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Happy New Year! 2014...only one year before Marty McFly's trip to the future {do hover skateboards exist yet?}. The new year is one of our busiest selling seasons (along with end of school and back to school) as families begin to get life back to a normal pace after the chaos of the holiday season. We all feel frazzled and unorganized and it feels good to slow down, take a deep breath, and get back to a routine. If you are like our family, you are climbing right back into the organization wagon. We slacked big time over the holidays and now we are starting up again...we've organized the kids' rooms, filled up the lunch boxes, repacked the backpacks, and rewritten our responsibility magnets. New family duties (by now, hopefully the ones that have been on there the past four months have become fairly habitual!), new chores, and we've added in a free day. We have realized that Fridays are just way too chaotic to mess with chores. Our kids still have to complete family duties (I mean, after all, Greg and I still have to have dinner on the table and our other family duties completed...), but we have thrown the white flag for any other responsibilities on Friday!
I say this over and over: what a great lesson to teach your children; to fall off the horse, then GET BACK ON AGAIN! Life is full of stumbles. It's regaining your foothold after you stumble that makes the difference in success or failure. I taught science for a few years after graduate school and one thing I used to tell my students all the time is that even if an experiment has not supported the hypothesis, it's still a success because we have LEARNED SOMETHING. It's the same with our family life. As we educate our children about life, independence, and how to be a genuinely good person, then making mistakes or faltering on a routine is part of that education. Use the teachable moments to your advantage as a parent.
Along the same lines is when my students would ask me a question I didn't know the answer to, I would laugh at the look on their faces when I said, "I don't know!" I remember one student said to me, "But you are a scientist. You are supposed to know everything about science." It's important for our children to know that it's okay to not know everything; just like it's okay to not be perfect at everything.
SO....get back on that horse. This newsletter is dedicated to all things new. Enjoy.
Gratefully,
The Beck Family
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 | PARENT GUIDE
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download it now!
We have taken the username/password restriction off our website in order to download the Parent's Guide. You can simply go to our website, www.fisher-kids.com, click on Resources for Families, then click on Parent's Guide. You can download it directly!
But to save you further hassle, here it is!
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| NEW PERSONALIZED DESIGNS
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lots more designs to choose from to give your child more ownership of his/her station!
New designs are now available! Here is a sneak peek at the new personalization options for nameplates, checklists, and checkbook registers! We are in the process of loading these designs on our website now, but wanted to give you first look! These will be loaded and ready for purchase this week.
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| NEW YEAR, NEW DEAL!
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get back to routine with our New Year Package
Get all of the following for $25.00 (a savings of 25%):
*new responsibility magnet
*new pack of 20 chore sticks
*new goal setting checklist
*new paycheck tearpad 
You can purchase the New Year Package here:
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| NEW YEAR, NEW RESPONSIBILITIES
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time to shake it up a bit!
Just like in our jobs, it's important to keep a level of challenge. I always prefer to be busy vs. bored...and our kids are no exception. The guiding concepts behind the design of our products are as follows (the four Cs): Creativity, Curiosity, Challenge, and all of this in a Controlled environment. So it's important to keep a level of challenge in your children's routine in order to keep them engaged and learning.
Let's start with the chore sticks themselves. Change these up! Your kids are getting older and they need to learn more independent skills. You know your child best, so keep the new chores age-appropriate and skill-appropriate. And as we mention in almost every newsletter, keep in mind that we aren't just teaching them how to clean! The tasks we are teaching them are those that will allow them to lead a healthy, safe, and happy life. They are tasks involved in our everyday life: cooking, gardening, auto care, grocery shopping, budgeting, the list goes on. Again, keep them age-appropriate, but challenging. Please remember, as parents we are the ultimate teacher, so it is important that we first teach our children the correct way to do the task, and follow up on accuracy. I always remember our oldest, Anna, was dusting our living room and she literally went around the table pieces, leaving a perfect dust pattern of the table decorations! It was like a chalk outline of a homicide scene, just no bodies....
Also change up their daily deeds that help out the family team. It takes about a month to make a habit for most of us (shorter for some; longer for others), so changing these up will add more habits to their daily life.
Do a commission check. It's important that we aren't paying our kids too much (this puts motivation on the decline and gives kids superfluous funds; when they are older, superfluous funds are not always a good thing). It's also important that we aren't paying them too little (if they will never reach their {realistic} goal, then why bother?).
Finally, if your child is in need of a gentle push in motivation, try incentives. It would be ideal if we were all motivated intrinsically, but that's just not always the case. Don't bribe....incentivize. There's a difference and it is primarily a difference of work ethic. I always think about a previous sales job I had; I was always motivated out of content routine by sales contests. So occasionally we give our kids little contests. Examples include:
*Do everything on your magnet this week and get double commission.
*Do everything on your magnet M-Th and get "vacation days" this weekend.
*For every week this month you complete your entire magnet responsibilities, get a free pass to put in your chore bucket.
Let us know your ideas! We love to hear from you!
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| NEW WEEKLY VIDEO
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covering topics relevant to raising kids these days!
So far, we have covered several topics relevant to using our products. Hopefully, these will give you yet one more way to stay motivated, get tips and advice, and answer any questions you might have. If there is anything you would like us to cover, please email us! You can check out our past couple of video blogs on our YouTube channel. Topics covered so far include: background of our company, intro to our responsibility station, using the add-on kit (multiple children on one board), chore stick picture tags, and our personalized checkbooks. Much more to come!
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| NEW SPINNERS!
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our new spinners are in and for sale!
Our new spinners are designed to hang right on your station! A dry-erase marker comes with the consequence spinner, dinner spinner, and boredom spinner. A grommet is at the top so that they can hang on the station directly, or from a hook/nail anywhere else. Enjoy! 
(NOTE: Our movie night spinner and naughty/nice spinner are still in a front-loaded glass frame.)
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| CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
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This text sent by a customer is hysterical...and it is one reason my husband and I created fisherkids! Read on and enjoy:
She did follow it up with a text reading, "Project Responsibility Station is underway!!"
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