The Buddy System

In order to help you guys understand a little bit more of what goes on at the Hill House, I'm going to start doing some informative posts such as this one. 

Today I'm going to show you how the Buddy System works. 

In the Buddy System, each older kid is assigned a younger kid, these are called "buddies".  Here are the assignments for our family: Johnna-Simon, Charissa-Tempi, Alison-Andrew and Claudia-Victoria. Now you may have noticed that there are some names missing from that list. Well there are. 

Gideon is taken care of by everyone, but his favorite person is Daddy. 

Mark is kind've the overseer of Emma, Judah and Levi. They're old enough to get their own food and get themselves dressed, Mark just ensures that they remember to do these things, and Nikki ensures that Mark does. 😉

The duties of buddies include: making sure the child is woken up, dressed (diaper changed in Tori's case), fed, hair and teeth brushed,  and that they are following the Schedule(we'll discuss that in a different post). We also make sure they're ready to go when we go places. 

All in all this system works really well for everyone. 

It helps us older kids get lots of time with the younger kids while providing us with real world parenting experience, it helps my parents not to stress as much and it helps the younger kids get educated more quickly! How? They emulate us, we have this amazing chance to mentor our younger siblings, and I think we do it pretty well.