He Works Hard for the Toy

Kinsey has spent the last year getting educated at BYU and is spending the summer at home with us.  She has decided that we are too soft on Carson, that he is learning bad habits, that we are enablers and we need to shape up before we ruin him!!  So, I took a few minutes from my solitaire game and bonbon eating to create a job chart for him.  He was trying to earn money for these two guys:

We set up a chore chart that looked like this:

Look at all those stickers he earned!  Each box was worth a quarter.  We forgot to add enough boxes for tithing and tax so he had to earn extras.  That kind of annoyed him a little.

We tried to think of the bad habits that we wanted to change.  For instance, he likes to come up and smack people on the behind.  He does that because we smack him on the behind when we do things like send him to his room for his pjs at night.  Do you ever do that?  "Go on upstairs and get your pjs, Carson!" and then send him up the stairs with a gentle spank?  With most children you can do cute things like that at home and they know better than to do them out in public but Carson has a pure spirit (that we may or may not have corrupted a teeny bit) and sees nothing wrong with smacking perfect strangers on the behind as they walk past him.  I watched (with a little bit of horror) as he smacked someone on the behind at church as he was going into Sunday School.  Luckily, the man was nice about it and just turned around and gave Carson a high five.  By the end of the week, when one of us (me) would smack his behind he would say "no mommy...no spanking!" and I had to apologize, so really...it was my bad habit we were trying to break.

Another bad habit that he has is sticking his tongue out at people.  We put the general "Be Nice" on the chore chart.  He is quickly repentant when he realizes he makes a mistake and says "Sorry!" so he did great at earning a sticker for that every day.

He worked hard all week, although looking at the chart, I see that we kind of dropped the ball a little bit on Tuesday and Wednesday.  We actually started the chart on Friday so we did well on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and Thursday.  Mostly thanks to Kinsey and Emily. They are much better at being the mom than I am.

On Friday he had earned enough stickers to go shopping.  We headed out to Target.  Carson insisted that we use a cart and also that he get to push it.  I had to apologize to a few people that he nearly ran over in his excitement to get to the toys.

See that cart on the left side of his face?  He ran her into the clothing.  Oops!

We finally made it to the toys and horror of horrors, they did not have the Power Rangers that he specifically wanted.  I tried to talk him into the green or blue one but nope, he wanted those two red one.  We tried to talk him into something else but he only had $15 and everything he wanted was in the $40-60 range.  He just did not understand why he couldn't just get whatever he picked out.

He had a great time playing with everything.

He loved looking at all of the large action figures.  The funny thing is, he loves the small ones better.  We have gotten him a few of the larger ones and he never plays with those but his little ones he plays with until the limbs are falling off.  We have had to duct tape a few arms and legs on his favorites.

Spiderman always loses his head in our house.

I was starting to worry that we would spend the rest of our lives in the toy department at Target but he finally agreed to go to Walmart.  I actually said a prayer before going into Walmart that we would find his toys because I hate shopping and the thought of having to go to any more stores was giving me a headache.

Luckily, the Walmart had the Power Rangers of his dreams.

Now, we get to start all over again.  Being a responsible parent is exhausting!!  Maybe I can talk him into an ice cream for his reward this week.