Photo credit: woodleywonderworks / Foter.com / CC BY A crazy thing happened in my home earlier this month. Something that hasn’t happened before and I would not have predicted would happen. My kids cooked for the whole family, and the food was good. Let that sink in for a minute Moms and Dads. Your kids, cooking food that you will actually eat…. I know, right? Here is how it all went down. I was talking to my boys about what they should get for their Mom for Mothers Day and also thinking about the things she would appreciate most. What stood out most in my memory, that she appreciated the most, were the experiences rather than the stuff. To be fair, she would have been happy and excited to receive anything from her children, but an actual experience over stuff might be even better. I made the suggestion and my …

The weather is slowly warming up for most of the United States and summer is just around the corner. All of a sudden, for many of us, the lawn is actually green again and needs pretty regular attention. We are also getting slammed with rain and that scottish guy on the commercials begging us to feed our lawns. (FEED IT!) Along with these seasonal changes come a change in seasonal chores around most households and there is no reason why your kids can’t lend a hand. Before you dive in head first of course though, remember to stay age appropriate with the chores. Of course your 5 year old isn’t going to be ready to mow the grass just yet. That being said, don’t wait until they are 15 before you let them take over that job either. Here are 10 Outdoor Summer Chore ideas you can add to ChoreMonster …

Photo credit: Michael Comeau / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND Mothers Day is this Sunday and it got me thinking about how important Mothers are. I know this isn’t a groundbreaking statement or anything but it’s true. Where would we be without the Mothers that have been part of our lives? You might have a traditional Mom that was there for you or maybe you were raised by someone who took on the role of Mother for you in one way or another, but at some point, in some way, all of us have been impacted positively by Moms. My Mom would do anything for me while I was growing up, and she would still today. I see those same traits in my wife for my kids. Moms do the thankless jobs like clean up after messy kids, cook for them and drive them everywhere and back again. Moms save their …

If you’re like me, you know that actually having to buy stuff can be, well, expensive. If you follow us on Twitter or Like our Facebook page you might have noticed that in the past couple of weeks, we started to give stuff away. Here at ChoreMonster, we are all parents, so we have a pretty good idea of what toys kids are interested in. The first week we gave away something that our kids (especially the boys) absolutely love when we put an Iron Man 3 Lego set on the line. Last week we tossed a more girl friendly prize into the mix and gave away a Monster High Travel Scaris Jinafire Long Doll. And now this week we have another great toy to give away, a Jinx Minecraft 6 Inch Vinyl Creeper figure. I know my boys are addicted to Minecraft stuff, even though to my eyes it …

Photo credit: Lucas Ninno / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA Boys rule in my house. There are four of us, there is only one of them her. There are no girl toys around, no girl television shows on and no pink clothing to be found in any rooms or closets. This of course didn’t happen on purpose, but it’s the environment we live in and there is simply no way to ignore it. As the Dad in this mix, you might think it’s a regular dream world, after all, the amount of girliness around our place is almost zero. We have a bin of girls dolls that spends most of the time in the closet and is really just reserved for when girl cousins come over and have no interest in the dude stuff my guys spend their time with. But I actually grew up in a house that was much …

Photo credit: theirhistory / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA ChoreMonster has created a system which makes chores fun for you kids. It might even make them beg to do more chores because of the potential rewards they can unlock. But even the most enthusiastic family can fall into a rut every now and then. If you’ve become a ChoreMonster regular, you know that it’s important to spice things up every now and then. Well today, we have some suggestions for you that might keep things from getting bogged down when it comes to your chore routine. How about spicing things up with a little friendly challenge? You might have read about the dinnertime competition that we started to use to calm down a sometimes crazy family meal, but there are more things you could try as well. And just to be fair, these ‘challenges’ are meant to get your kids excited …

We have a new feature to let you know about here on the blog today. It’s not groundbreaking but lots of you have asked for it and so we wanted to share the news. You can now add the same chore for all of your kids, at once, using the web version of ChoreMonster. So if your kids all have to make their beds on a daily basis, when you set that up on the web while logged into your parent account you don’t have to add it separately for each child. Instead, just add the chore for one of them and then use the handy checkboxes like you see in the image below to copy it for your other kids. We hope this helps you save a shred of your valuable time as you use our product. This is currently a web only feature but we hope to add …

Step-parenting is not a competition. I’m not referring to entering yourself into a competition with other step-parents (which I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist anyway) but rather the contest that can silently exist between your kids biological parent and you, the step-parent. Whether your step-kids spend most of their time with you, less time or it’s an equal split this element can come into play. Here is a scenario I can recall from my early years as a new step-parent. My wife and I are the primary household for our kids. This means they spend the entire week with us, and then spend a weekend or maybe just a weekend night with their Dad. The weekends away from us typically would include dinner out, theme park visits, late night movies and video games and sometimes small shopping trips. It wasn’t all candy and adventure, but it was way more than they …

Frank Rumpnoodle is the Junior Assistant Vice Associate Manager of ChoreMonster, and considers himself to be very important. He doesn’t like to work much, but he does love interviews. A couple weeks ago, we asked that you submit questions for Frank and we got some really excellent ones from your kids that Frank was kind enough to answer. Here they are! Question from Steele: “Are tomatos a fruit?” Frank: Tomatos? Are those the red ones and get all messy? I think they are vegetables, it’s what they make ketchup out of right? And people put that on everything so when you put it on stuff just tell your parents it’s your vegetable for the day! Question from Elouise: “I was wondering if Frank finds it hard looking after SO many monsters?” Frank: Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t really have to look after them ALL the time. I …

If I haven’t admitted it before, I’m doing it now. I am a lazy parent. That’s right, I said the words you’ve probably said to yourself many times over. But don’t feel bad about it, you aren’t alone! Lazy parents unite! Well, maybe not, I mean, who has time for that, right? All kidding aside, one of the things that constantly suffers in my house when my wife and I are being lazy is how we reward our kids for their hard work. They are far from perfect when it comes to chores and even when it comes to keeping up with using ChoreMonster. It’s tough enough to make it a habit, but it can be even tougher to be consistent with that habit, even when you’ve had a good run of success. Here is an example from my home that popped up over the weekend. We had three or …