We've been playing two really fun games every day for the last few weeks.  One will get your kitchen and dining room completely clean at least once a day. The other will pique the curiousity of  every member of your family and have them running for their Bibles.

The first game we do right after dinner every night.  As soon as dinner is over, Tim takes Abe into the living room to have a little Daddy/Baby time. The rest of us get to work on the kitchen and dining room.

Here's the rules:

1. Mom stays until all the work is done.

2. All the work gets done, from washing down the fridge and microwave to mopping and vacuuming.

3. If Mom catches anyone fooling around or standing around, she dismisses a hardworking child from the work. So Lazy Goofball continues working, but because of his actions (or lack thereof), one of the hard working diligent kids is sent to the living room to play with Dad and Abe.

Someone had mentioned in a comment on one of my entries that she had a few children who tended to let others carry most of the work.  I started watching my children very carefully, and found that I had two that fit that bill.  One because she was unskilled because I hadn't taken the time to train her. The other because she just doesn't like working.

So basically I ended up with just these two girls every night because I would catch them standing around or messing around and one by one all the others ended up being dismissed.  This was great because my lazy gal started getting to work. She realized that the lazier she was, the more work she ended up with.  And my little one who wasn't trained ended up spending lots of time with me showing her how to sweep and put food away and fill the dishwasher.

It didn't take too long for Miss Lazybones to get a move on, and Miss Unskilled is slowly getting to the point where she could probably clean the whole kitchen all by herself.

And I get to get up to a shining kitchen and dining room every single morning.

The second game is one that we got from The Bible Study Guide For All Ages.  It's called Who Am I?, a Bible version of Twenty Questions.

At dinner time, we choose someone to start.  Tonight it was Jills.  She chose a very easy character...Joseph...and surprisingly, it took most of dinner for everyone to guess. Probably because for the last few days we had been choosing very obscure characters.

Jills starts out by saying, "Who am I", and then the rest of us ask her questions she can answer by saying Yes, No, or I don't know.  "I don't know" would cover issues the Bible doesn't address.

So for Joseph, the questions would be along these lines:

*Is it a man?

*Is he in the OT?

*Did he live before David?

*Did he spend time in a boat?

*Was he ever in the desert?

*Did he have many children?

*Did he have one wife?

*Was he a godly man?

If someone guesses a name and is wrong, then he is out till the next game.

My children are picking up all kinds of details they've missed over the years.  The other night while guessing, I asked if the man was bald. My children started hooting and hollering, declaring that no one in the Bible was said to be bald.  So I retold again the story of Elisha, and the fact that he was bald and that some kids made fun of him just really brought him into focus for the kids as a real person.  Being wounded or possibly killed by a bear sent by God for disrespect made my children sit up a bit straighter in their seats.  We were all a little sobered by how serious God is regarding respect and foolish jesting.

Tim caught us all really well tonight by choosing Michael, the archangel.

I caught them the other night by choosing Rahab.

I'm waiting for someone to choose Balaam's ass. That will be a fun one. Oh! Or the fish with the coin in it's mouth! I'm using that one next time it's my turn.