The Quest is Off and Running (officially)!

We have been having family meetings for over a week now (I wanted to get them started early for our October Challenge). I am excited to announce that results are starting to happen! Our stress scales are starting to lower. I decided to only involve the five of my seven children that still live at home full-time for this one month quest.

Here are the starting numbers from 9/21/09:
On the scale of 1-10, how would you rate your personal stress level. One being absolutely no stress, ten being ready for a nervous breakdown. Average your stress over the past week.

• Paula: 8
• Butch: 8
• Panda: 6
• Dakota: 5
• Josh: 5
• Holden: 4
• Mickey: 3

Each meeting we each bring something that is causing stress to the table. Many things have been brought to the table that I was not even aware of! This has already been a very worthwhile journey.

At the first meeting, Dakota brought up the problem with his younger siblings not giving him privacy when he has friends over. We discussed this as a family and the younger siblings now have better knowledge of what he feels like. We also decided that if they did not follow the new privacy pact, Mom or Dad would assign a sibling to tag along when they were with friends. Wow, that opened some eyes.
Dakota

The next meeting, one of the issues brought up by Josh is that he is not always sure when it is the best time to do his chores so he tends to put them off which results in getting in trouble. Our solution as a family is that each person should have a meeting with Mom and Dad to set up a schedule for their chores. This will alleviate any further confusion on times. But since this was brought up, Mom proposed that everyone rotate chores more often which seemed to please everyone.
Josh

At our first Sunday luncheon meeting, Mickey brought a very important yet heart-wrenching item to the table. Mickey is mildly over-weight, her older siblings, the boys, have been calling her fat, though sometimes using other words. This is really bothering her and brought her to tears at our meeting. No names even had to be said, all of them felt really bad because they had not realized that the name-calling was having such an impact on her.
Mickey