Compromise?

Okay, on day five of these clothes, Toby finally took them off to go in a sprinkler park. Somehow I didn't anticipate the opportunity and hadn't brought clean ones for him to change into when he was done. I decided that I was not giving back the really filthy ones, and was able to scrounge a clean T-shirt, shorts, and underpants from a friend whose son is just a little bigger. Left to his own devices, who only knows how long that would have gone on. Needless to say, he has not bathed.

With still no progress on the playdate P&R, and pressure from Dan about summer vacation slipping away, I offered Toby an alternate way to earn one playdate - clean up all his birthday gift crap that has been carpeting my house for the past 5 days. He worked promptly and rapidly, and had about 80% of it done in twenty or thirty minutes. We decided he would use the playdate tomorrow when it could be longer, rather then this evening. He would finish the job in the morning. And then...

We were having dinner on our back porch when another friend from school arrived at our next-door neighbor's (Toby's best friend). He asked if he could go over to play if he finished his clean-up job now. I agreed to this, and while he was starting to pick things up, both girls appeared in our backyard! This of course made him frantic to get done and out there, and I was holding him back, showing him what needed to be done - not ideal at all. But he did get a lot of it done and then emphatically enjoyed running back and forth between the houses with his friends - and Hazel too. I felt like I lost control of everything when those girls showed up - I could have sent them back, but boy, would that make me the villain. Instead I tried to go with the flow and I think it was okay - I didn't cave on our agreement, and Toby was able to follow through with it (basically). So we got some positive results.