I had read about an Amish practice of all the ladies getting together for various work bees at each other's homes. This sounded like something I wanted, so I started one here in my town, among the Christian Unschoolers here. We call it Sisters Day and have just started.

It's so great. There are eight of us, and at the moment we are holding two work days a month, one is a 4-hour morning shift, the other is on another day for an afternoon shift. Each member is required to give only 3 hours a month, and can split that time up at both work days, or attend only one for their whole 3 hours.

We set it up that way because we thought we were going to have 12 sisters participating, and we each wanted 2 help days a year. Now that we have only 8, we'll end up either assigning everyone a third help day, or perhaps we'll use the extra scheduled days to do group activities such as baking Christmas cookies all together, then dividing them up, or having a Canning Day all together, or a Supper Cooking Day, or perhaps we'll all volunteer at an outside charity once or twice a year.

We are required to RSVP so that the hostess can be sure of having enough people coming, and everyone coming brings a simple potluck dish to share, and we end our work with a meal together. Since we're meeting on weekdays, we just bring the kids along. On our first work day there were 16 kids, from the ages of 3 to 16. We had them help work, with breaks to play in between. They ended up getting along great, and they got a lot of work done, and a lot of playing in. We're expecting that at each Work Day 1-2 moms will watch the kids and perhaps plan activities for them, if they wish.

Now I can't wait until my help days come up (we have a yearly schedule). I want help with harvesting and preserving, Spring Cleaning, and finishing the crazy quilt I started years ago. In just one session we'll get the whole quilt finished! We hope to have between 4-6 sisters helping at each work day. The first one was fun--I'm looking forward to the next.