| Jun. 25th, 2005 @ 09:22 pm You break it, you buy it |
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Current Mood:  contemplative
One of the worst aspects of parenting is having to dole out consequences. I waiver between wondering if I'm being too harsh to feeling like I'm not being harsh enough. I always remind my husband and myself that you shouldn't threaten it if you really don't plan on following through. Some days, being a mom really sucks.
The last two days have been majorly sucky.
First, you need to understand two very basic and easy to understand (so I thought) rules in our home.
The first is, the baby gate needs to be shut to keep Kari contained. It is always OK to ask for help in opening and shutting the gate. You must not, however, CLIMB over the gate as it is mounted to the wall.
The second, easily understood rule is no food in the living room, and by extension, no food at the computer. Both of these no food rules are reiterated daily and explicitly. "GET THAT FOOD BACK INTO THE KITCHEN, NOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWW" is pretty easy to understand. Even Kari understands.
Yesterday, Kari was napping and the gate wasn't shut. This is fine as she didn't need to be contained. I went to put the mail out. Thirty seconds later, my oldest runs out SCREAMING "i'm sorry mommy it was an accident!" I'm thinking something serious has happened... like there would be blood spurting from someone's head, the way he's carrying on. I finally get him calmed down enough to tell me he was climbing over the unlocked baby gate and he "accidently" broke it. Sure enough, he snapped one of the wall mounts right in half!
Needless to say, I was LIVID. The wallspace we use for the gate isn't original to the house and isn't straight. without the gate permanently mounted on one side, the gate is useless as it won't line up.
I really can't fathom why he felt the need to climb over a gate that wasn't shut. the minute he started to climb, it would have started to swing. Logically, he should have STOPPED.
The only natural consequnce for this is for my dear son is to have to buy a new babygate. He doesn't have any money and doesn't have an allowance. I don't believe in paying children to help out for normal jobs around the house. We do, on the other hand, pay the children if they do something above and beyond. Alex's sentence, then...twenty hours of community service (ie extra chores)...at $1/hr hopefully he'll learn the value of a dollar and the importance of taking care of things so they last.
Still, my boy, despite his near genius IQ, is slow to learn.
It won't take a Jimmy Neutron to figure out which rule he broke and the disastrous consequences...
He decided to 1) lie to daddy and say he wasn't grounded from the computer (he was bullying his siblings and being downright rude to me) and 2) eat a yoghurt at the computer oh and 3) play a computer game he knows he's not allowed to play.
Naturally, the yoghurt spilled all over the laptop and, for all intents and purposes, has ruined the keyboard. It beeps rudely when you try to start it up and won't fully load. a key somewhere is stuck, preventing windows for booting properly.
Not only is the boy grounded from teh computer for the next month, he's received an additional 1500 hours of hard time. OK I know that's excessive. We're going to take the computer in to see if we can get the keyboard fixed. If we can, he'll be responsible for working off the repair costs.
Today, he had to clean his room without any assistance from his little brother (ben made the majority of the mess), and, instead of going to a luau with the rest of the family, he went to a neighbor's house and did chores for her. Yeah, I know I'm cruel. My neighbor said she knew she was giving him just the right amount of work because he complained the whole time LOL She had him break down boxes, pick up the yard, hold her baby so she could do things, fold laundry... he put in another 2 hours for her. Tomorrow he's slated to help shovel sand for another neighbor's project.
The way I look at it, two or three weeks worth of extra chores around the house and helping at the neighbors' should be enough to make an impact that we're serious. The neighbors aren't paying him, but we're keeping a talley. After he's worked enough to buy a new gate, we'll take him down and he'll buy it with his literally hard earned money. I'm really hoping at that point he'll finally "get it." |
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