Cheaper By the Dozen

I've never seen any of the movies that were made about this book but I LOVED the book! It is so funny and I couldn't put it down. Can you imagine twelve kids? This book is written by two of the older children. Frank Jr. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth.
So, the Father, Frank, is really smart and well educated and gets into this idea of efficency. Cut out all the stuff you don't need to do and stop wasting your own time. If you don't need to do something-don't do it. I loved that he called the daily activities that had to be done "unavoidable delays." These are things like, eating, bathing, sleeping, getting dressed, things like that. He was constantly teaching his children and I just had to laugh at some of his methods. For instance, taking a bath. He felt that there was no reason why you should be in there more than five minutes and to illustrate this he took a bar of soap in his right hand and started down the left arm, left leg up the stomach and passed the soap to his left hand and started down the right side and finished up. He taught the boys this in the tub, the girls he did it fully clothed in the living room on the floor. Hilarious! He wanted to save time even doing those unavoidable delays and tried to do this shaving. He had a shave brush in both hands and then tried shavers in both hands. He was upset because while he did save 44 seconds using both hands, he lost two minutes taking care of the cut on his neck! The children had to listen to French and German language records when they were in their bath and to teach them about morse code he painted messages on the walls and on the ceilings so that they would constantly see them even as they went to bed. If they uncoded the messages it could lead them to a prize! Anyway, these are just a few of the things I loved. Without writing the whole book here! I totally recommend it. It's small and easy reading. It made me want to teach my children in some of these creative ways. One member of the book club pointed out that this book is truly a gift to the younger children of this family because the father died when the youngest was only two. They never knew him and didn't know what life was like for the older children. He ran his house like a business and had the "purchasing committee" to help with the shopping and other things like that. Preparing them to be able to take care of themselves so that their mother wouldn't have the burden of providing for twelve children on her own. And he did a great job. I loved this book! Read it...just writing about it makes me want to go out and buy it and read it again!