Clean-up day

I wrote a nice, juicy post yesterday about the week as a whole and my final analysis, but the computer ate it. Here's the wrap-up, hopefully I'll recreate the analysis part afterwards.

Today the children wanted to go to the local amusement park. I told them we needed to do a big part of the clean-up first, then I would take them. I gave them each an empty laundry basket, and the first game was for each child to go through the house and collect all their own clothes that they found - whoever had fewer clothes in their basket at the end was the winner, but if I found any article of clothing left around the house, that person would be disqualified. They eagerly ran around, gathering their items. Hazel had fewer clothes in her basket, but neither won because they both had overlooked a few things. Then we carried the baskets to the laundry room together, and they put everything in the washer.

For the second game, each child got a plastic bag. They were sent to collect any pieces of food that they could find left out, and whoever had more in their bag at the end was the winner. Toby won that one with 8 1/2 ounces, compared to Hazel's six.

The third game brought back the laundry baskets. Each child was told to gather up any of their own possessions they found lying around the house, as well as any mess that they had made. Both baskets came back quite full! Both children were declared winners of round 3 - but to be eligible to receive their prize, every item in the baskets needed to be put away in its proper place.

We spent about 45 minutes and cleaned up about 90% of the mess. The prizes consisted of the trip to the amusement park and an increase in the amount of spending money they got for the day there. We also held hands and did a few victory jumps together. A positive grand finale for everyone.

The major points of learning from this week:

- Hazel is still too young to get much out of this exercise - very little sense of consequence
- Toby was nearly perfect with dental care on his own
- both children got themselves to bed at a reasonable time almost every night
- both children continued to eat a variety of healthy foods
- neither child ate sweets to excess (they barely seemed to eat any more than I would have allowed anyway)
- they both enjoyed more screen time than is normally allowed but also continued to participate in other activities like outside time and reading
- neither child performed ANY contributions the entire week

So we agreed as a family to suspend food and dessert rules and evaluate in one month. This is huge for me, as surrendering control over nutrition was unthinkable before. And I will stop interfering in Toby's oral hygeine. Screen time agreements are still in effect, but next time around I think I'll be ready to let go of that completely and see where it takes us.

I got a lot out of this week, I think it really moved us forward.