A Whole New Plan

Recently, my son has been testing all the adults in his daily life to see how much he can get away with.  At times he really is quite the little tyrant, demanding and expecting us to abide by his way.  Nothing that isn't common for a child his age and yet it has gone on long enough now that our current methods of punishment and reward were no longer working and everyone was frustrated and feeling like a failure.

We had been giving time outs and taking away privileges when he was excessively disrespectful.  This plan was hit and miss at home after he kept adding days to the time he lost the privilege of playing with the iPad that it became hard for even us adults to keep track.   Meanwhile this method was still working fine at day care until the last two weeks, when I would get a call from day care every couple days that he was not being respectful of his caregivers and even ran away when he was picked up from school!

So, I hit up the great and wonderful Twitter and got some really wonderful new ideas to add to our box of parenting tools.  Chris and I combined those ideas into a new, hopefully to be successful, plan of action.

Ian will now start the day with 5 points (2 from Chris and I and 3 from day care.)  For each incident beyond the usual reminders he will lose one of those points.  He also has the chance to earn extra points for over and above good behavior.  Every ten points earned he will be able to choose a goody from a grab bag of items that Ian and I went out and picked yesterday from the dollar store and Target.  If he would prefer he can select to have some iPad play time instead of a goody in the bag for his reward.

I'll try to report back how this is working.  I'm still open to any new suggestions, so please leave a comment if you have anything to add!  I would really appreciate the input.

Long, Busy Weekend

In July we will have had our house for 8 years (how can it really be that long already?)  For all that time we have been working pretty much non-stop on remodeling and updating.  There is not one room in the house that hasn't had a face lift of some sort.  So, we had lot of left over pieces and parts of construction materials laying around and taking up precious space.  I ordered a dumpster to be delivered to the house on Friday and today it is full!  We had already taking anything reusable to Restore so everything left just needed to go.

We totally reorganized both sheds.  Yes, we have two sheds in our yard, but no garage.  Shed west, as we like to call it, is now a work room and tool storage (see picture above.)  Shed east is purely storage now and holds the lawnmower and snow blower.  As you might know, I love me some organizing so this part of the work was actually a little fun for me.  I loved fitting the various totes of storage items into shed east like I was playing a very large game of tetris.  Thankfully, we are lucky enough to have the means to store Ian's old clothing to pass along and to store totes of materials for drywall projects and painting projects to come in the future.

Hopefully, we can keep up with the organization now that we have hooks and shelves galore in shed west for storing everything.  I think that Chris is pretty excited to have the shed clean enough that he can actually go inside and use it like a little work room.   I'm excited to start the summer with a clean slate!