Attempting to Exploit Potter Mania for Household Peace

Up until last week, we were a Three Strikes household . . . as in each kid could accrue up to three strikes a day for behaving badly. Upon receiving a third strike, a privilege would be revoked for the remainder of the day, say, watching TV, playing video games or going to a friend’s house. If the kid continued to misbehave, privileges would be revoked for the following day. (Frequently, though, I was a soft touch and allowed the kids to “earn away” the strike by being super good.)
However the Three Strikes technique had mixed results here in the Picket Fence Post household. Thus I decided to try a different tact this summer.


Image credit: Warner Brothers via Yahoo Kids

Capitalizing on the excitement regarding the release of the final Harry Potter film – and the fact that The Spouse and I are still doing our Harry Potter Reading Aloud Project with The Youngest Son – I went a different way. Instead of using the punitive Three Strikes system, I’ve decided to implement my own version of Hogwarts’ “House points” system. It works like this:

If a kid exhibits “good behavior” – a completely subjective determination made by either The Spouse or me – he or she gets a penny (or “House point”) deposited into his or her jar on the kitchen counter. Just like at Hogwarts, if someone behaves badly, he or she can lose one or more “House points.” At the end of the week, the child with the most House points gets to select a film for Family Movie Night. At the end of the month, the kid with the most points will be able to select a family activity (which needs parental approval) for a Saturday or a Sunday.

The first week yielded an absolute blizzard of good behavior. The kids were doing the dishes, taking out the trash, offering shoulder rubs, fetching my newspapers from the driveway, making me cups of tea. It was a pleasure to have such doting people around, even though I knew they were only in it for House points. But by the end of the week, The Girl realized that her twin brother had been outgunning her and protested, saying that kids shouldn’t be rewarded for “sucking up.” And she had a point.

Now, in its second week, there’s not so much a blizzard as there are intermittent flurries of good behavior, especially since we said that they shouldn’t overtly try to suck up to us. Plus, there’s been an uptick in the deduction of House points for bad behavior.

Maybe I should channel a bit more of the tough-minded albeit fair Professor McGonagall for the remainder of the summer.

Image credit: Warner Brothers via Yahoo Kids.

Spoiled

The Spouse and I, mad with dark power, opted to torture our three children yesterday by forcing them to sit . . . get this . . . side-by-side in the back of The Spouse's sedan. Can you believe it, the horror of it all?

Instead of taking my SUV-crossover, in which one of them could sit in the third row, we took the sedan to our destination, a 40-minute drive from our house, forcing them to have to split the backseat three ways.

Oh, and did we hear about the dismal conditions! All the way there and all the way home, until The Youngest Boy fell asleep on the way back last night.

To show them how spoiled they are by the ample leg room they're afforded -- both The Spouse and I are only too well acquainted with the invisible dividing lines we drew with our siblings down the back seats of cars when we were children, cars with no AC -- The Spouse and I are considering that, whenever possible, we should take his sedan instead of my car to teach them a lesson. A lesson about what I'm not sure, but we're sick of them whining about how we're torturing them as they sit in the air conditioned car.

It's School Time . . . Where Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

There comes a point during the summer when you're a work-from-home or an at-home parent, where you feel like you're going to lose your mind. Either the kids won't stop fighting over stupid stuff or they're telling you they're bored (like you're their cruise director in charge of their amusement or something) or they're nagging you to death for a) TV b) video games c) snacks d) all of the above.

Today as the three Picket Fence Post children went off to school, I was saddened to see the summer come to an end, but was pleased that I'll get a reprieve from moments like this one (though I'm not usually lying down in a bed when the children are still awake):

Sometimes We All Need an Escape Chute

When I opened up my Facebook account yesterday, I saw a post from a friend of mine who is obviously a kindred spirit when it comes to this whole parenting thing.

She wrote: “I am seriously getting depressed. If I see one more post about what a perfect family day someone had I am going to scream. My kids are driving me crazy and they are driving each other crazy. Nothing is perfect or idyllic here more like a slow boil with the chance to bubble over at any second.”

Her post seemed to have opened up a spigot of frustration as a chorus of similar parental sentiments followed in the comments section. Moms and dads chimed in with their not-so-nice feelings about the oftentimes aggravating, overheated days of summer. One person said that her kids constantly shouting “Mom!” were starting to make her feel like a “homicidal maniac.” Another joked that she’s only going to respond to her children calling for her when they refer to her as “Your Majesty." (Not a bad idea.)

I tossed my less-than-ideal summer observations into the mix, admitting that this week I’ve hidden from the Picket Fence Post kids in the garage so I could carry on an uninterrupted telephone conversation. (I could hear them looking for me but I said nothing as I sat there in the dark. No, I'm not proud.) Yesterday, I intentionally let them rug rats waste away the morning hours in front of the TV because they were driving me nuts and I needed the time to finish some work without being harassed.

There must be something in the air, because this morning I read a page one story in the New York Times about a flight attendant who, like some of these parents, has had enough. When a passenger on a New York-bound flight left his seat to get the belongings he'd stowed in the overhead compartment after the plane had touched down but it was not yet safe for passengers to leave their seats, a longtime airline attendant, Steven Slater, told the passenger he had to sit down. Here’s how the rest of this weirdly inspiring story played out, according to the Times:

“The passenger defied [the flight attendant]. Mr. Slater reached the passenger just as he pulled down his luggage [from the overhead compartment], which hit Mr. Slater in the head.

Mr. Slater asked for an apology. The passenger instead cursed at him. Mr. Slater got on the plane’s public address system and cursed out the passenger for all to hear. After citing his 20 years in the airline industry, he blurted out, ‘That’s enough.’ He then activated the inflatable evacuation slide at a service exit and left the world of flight attending behind.”

He paused, however, to grab two beers from the service cart before jumping down the slide and running across the tarmac to the employee parking lot, the paper reported. (Unfortunately, Slater was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and reckless endangerment.)



The comments on the Times web site about this story cracked me up. “I am having one of these [evacuation chutes] installed in every meeting room,” one person said, adding, “Haven’t we all wanted to hit the ‘escape button?”

Another said, “I wish my office had an evacuation slide.”

And for parents with young kids who spend summer days behaving like kids – meaning tormenting their siblings, challenging/harassing their parents and acting like the immature little creatures they are – don’t we all sometimes need an escape chute, an evacuation slide? Or at least a darkened garage to slip off to when Mommy needs a time out?

UPDATE: Apparently Steven Slater has already been christened a "folk hero," according to New York Magazine. There are Free Steven Slater T-shirts, a Steven Slater Legal Defense Fund and even a move to try to get folks to contact JetBlue on his behalf.

Lobbying to Stay Home Alone by Reenacting Scenes from a Sitcom and Making Me a Sandwich

I was going to make them accompany me.

All three of them.

To a business meeting.

I had a meeting scheduled in the next town over in the middle of the day. Our babysitter was unavailable and The Spouse couldn’t work from home, so I told the Picket Fence Post kids (ages 9, almost 12 and almost 12), “Sorry guys, but you’re going to have to come with me.”

Cue the whining, followed quickly by the enthusiastic pleading from the older two, “Why of course our dear mother, we can be trusted to be left home alone, and besides, you yourself have said we older children could soon babysit.”

I’ve frequently left the kids alone for short periods of time, but I try not to saddle the elder two with their younger brother who can be a handful (who isn’t at age 9?) too often. It just causes friction when they tell him what to do and he resents it.

However they didn’t exactly help their case on this particular occasion when the two boys started fighting over whether someone “took” something from the other’s room and the alleged thief ran and hid in his bedroom with the purloined object.

I heard them arguing and fighting while I was trying to take a shower and get ready. While still in a towel, hair dripping wet, I stormed over to the door to the hallway and shouted, “That’s it! EVERYONE’S coming with me. You people can’t handle it!” Then I slammed the door shut.

Minutes later, the three of them – with whom I’ve recently been watching season one episodes of Malcolm in the Middle -- started reenacting scenes from the second episode, “Red Dress” where, as a response to their mother’s punishments, the TV sitcom kids wanted to show how gleeful and cooperative they were and joined hands, danced in a circle while singing, pretending like they were all one lovey-dovey bunch of siblings.

But my kids took things further. Once I made my way to the kitchen, I discovered that my trio had made me a turkey sandwich, fetched me a glass of ice water, unilaterally offered to rub my shoulders as I ate and even presented me with the sandals I was going to wear – no lie – on a pillow.

“Fine,” I said, relenting to their charming though utterly transparent, ham-handed lobbying campaign, “but this is a test. If you three cannot get along, if you fight and things don’t work well, you’re not going to be left alone any time soon and will have to come with me to meetings.”

If there were any problems, I never heard about them. They wisely kept their traps shut. Nor did I find find evidence of any scuffles shoved into corners or stuffed down into bottom of the trashcan.

Yet.

Image credit: Fox via Fancast.