"Old Toys" Store

For those of you who are unfamiliar with my parenting style...a drill sergeant may seem harsh, but you can't argue with his results.  That is where I have found myself the last several weeks.  I think the girls are just testing me, so I fought back.  After BEGGING them for a week to pickup after themselves, I had had enough.  I gave them 10 minutes and anything they couldn't pick up in that amount of time was going in a trash bag.  I was not messing around!


 Now my problem was what to do with all of this stuff.  The first several days they didn't even seem to be affected by this.  So much so, we had to have a second round of trash bag clean up.  I told them they needed to straighten their acts or they weren't getting anything from Dad and Mom for Christmas either - which might have been a little harsh, but that is just how DONE I was!


Then I had an epiphany!  Several months ago we started a chore chart for the girls.  Each one had chores they could do based on their age.  The plexi-glass frame served as a dry erase board allowing them to mark off their chores every night.  At the end of the week, they would get $1 if they did ALL their chores ALL week.  They did very well the first several weeks, but lost interest and I didn't stay diligent about getting them to do it.  However, we are now going to try to pay them $0.20 a day for doing their chores.  That way they are motivated each day.  At the end of the week, we will let them "go shopping" in their very own "toy store".  Each toy will cost them $0.50 - a week's pay.  Oh, and they were told, if they leave them out again, any toy can be confiscated again.

We bought tiny piggy banks in the $1 bargain bin at Target and wrote their names on them with paint pens.  (I even bought an extra bank for each of them in case the first one got broken.)  When the girls remembered they still had some money from a couple months ago, they got so excited and wanted to know if they could buy a few toys now.  So we cracked out the money and let the process begin.  We'll have to see how this goes.

Hopefully, the next post will be a more organized "toy store".  Digging through all those bags to find the one thing they have asked for is a chore within itself!