Tuesday, June 8, 2010

I never claimed to be an expert

You know the month(s) before Christmas when you toss out random little threats to your kids in hopes of getting them to behave better? Like... You better quit fighting with your brother because Santa's elves are keeping tabs on you! Or... If you don't clean up every single one of these toys I'm calling up Mr. St. Nick myself and informing him you don't need anything else!!! You also know how those little reminders only work for so long before the kids a) figure out on their own Santa's going to deliver anyways or b) the older ones inform the younger ones that Mom's been threatening that for years and they have yet to see a completely dry Christmas?

Well that's this week in a different sort of way. I'm in the overwhelming midst of getting ready to put on a garage sale this weekend. Eh. Amongst the bags of outgrown clothing and boxes of random miscellaneous stuff I've lost my steam completely. Why did I sign up for this again?

But one thing I do, uh.. did... enjoy about the whole process was the way I could use the garage sale as a motivator for my kids to do something around here. Not sure it worked that extremely well, but still. I used all sorts of great and well-thought-out lines like: whatever' is not off of this floor in three minutes is going in the garage sale! or, Since you're not going to pick up your hockey stuff, I will. AND I'll carry it right over to the door so it's ready to go out with the stuff for the garage sale. Oh, I was on a roll. Came up with new threats every morning while I drank my coffee and smugly dispensed them throughout the day.

Until this evening when my sweet little five year old said to me after one of my fly-off-the-handle-moments, "Mom, I'm gonna sell you in the garage sale so someone else can listen to you yell." Ah, yup. So we're right back at square one with Mr. Freezie bribes.

Something tells me this isn't the theme and advice of any best-selling parenting books on the market.

1 comment:

Juli said...

hehehe, Lydia!;)