The plan to play in the sand was also a complete success. The girls had fun, and we could have stayed longer if Little Girl's diaper hadn't been so wet it looked like it was holding the equivalent volume of the Gulf of Mexico. What can I do? We had to go home and take care of that. It was a good 45-60 minutes at the park. It's not like they didn't get a chance to play.
We did go shopping. The things I was unable to find a Wal-mart yesterday were readily available at The Container Store, so I'm good to go. One thing I needed to find today was to fix up the ailing penny chart. I mentioned it yesterday, so I'll describe it in detail today, since one of the mini-projects I did today was to support that.
When Big Girl was about four years old, we were struggling to get her to be independent about some particular tasks, like dress herself, wipe herself (that was a big one!), eat her dinner, play nicely with her sister, and stuff like that. We were given advice to use stickers or something to motivate her with positive reinforcement. I'm not a big fan of stickers as rewards because you have to constantly keep buying more stickers, and then where do you put the stickers? Do you make a new chart every time? Not my idea of how I want to do things.
Then one day after my husband took her to school, he told me about a system they were doing with her using money velroed to a chart. Now that I liked. You put the velcro on the money, and then use it over and over again. So here's the chart we have (pictured).
And what I made today was the bank. Prior to this we had a strip of velcro with adhesive magnets on the back, and it was not working well at all. The magnets weren't holding, and the whole strip fell down between the fridge and the cabinets several times. Our penny chart is just an excel file I created. (The smudgy areas are where I blocked out her name. Yay for Photoshop!) To the left you can see the end of the hand-written list of things that she can do to earn pennies. She's graduated from things like "Wipe yourself after going poo-poo" to "Get dressed and put on socks and shoes before 7:00 AM". She and I worked on the new list together this morning over breakfast.I'm hoping to start this system with my little girl pretty soon. One of the things she'll have on there is GOING POTTY!!! I hope the reward system will work for her. I'll have to bribe her with Polly Pockets and stuff when she earns big amounts, like a quarter.
In addition to being reusable, the money system has also taught Big Girl about denominations of money. She knows what equals what. She'll be better at making change at age 7 or 8 than most 16-year-old cashiers at McDonalds.
At the bottom of the chart it says what she gets as rewards for each level of achievement. She gets computer time for a nickel, a special surprise for a quarter (the dollar bin stuff at the front of Target!), and for a dollar, she gets a trip to our local inflatable play park, a particular favorite outing for them both. I'll probably have to change the rewards for Little Girl, like I was saying. Computer time is a big deal to Big Girl, and that's such a great motivator for her.
I want to share a couple more things before I must go rest (those 1 AM nights are really catching up with me!!). One is that my little girl today asked me why I was mad at her. I was not mad at her, but I wasn't being playful at that moment, and I'm super tired. Still, this caught me entirely off guard. It was a very perceptive thing for her to ask me.
The other thing is my big girl's attempts at humor have been funny for their un-funny-ness. Last week I taught her the joke, "Why is Six afraid of Seven? Because Seven ATE Nine." Then Sunday afternoon she tried to tell this one, "Why is Seven afraid of Eight? Because Eight, Nine, Ten!" Oh, so very un-funny. We (my parents and I) tried to tell her that the first one is funny because eight and ate are homophones (she knows what homophones are- about six months ago we had great fun making a list of them, and since then, she brings it up when she notices one). But she doesn't get it. Another one she's been telling is this, "Why did one shirt chase the other? Because they were playing tag." I understand why she thinks that one is funny- because shirts don't play tag. But it's not anywhere close to yuck-yuck funny, and yet, she cracks up telling that one. She is a pro at telling her 3 or so knock-knock jokes. Even then, she delivers it just a bit off, "Orange you glad I didn't say A BANANA?" It's close, but slightly off.
And with that, I'm about to fall asleep in my chair. I must go rest. I'm so tired I'm not hearing a song right now, which frightens me somewhat. Oh well, I made up for it last night!
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