New Game?

So Tom and I decided that as part of our New Year's goals we'd make an effort to get the kids in bed a little earlier (especially Erin) and keep the play area on the main floor a little more cleaned up. So we started out by explaining to Erin that before bed we would take 5 minutes to clean up. We'd set the timer and say, "OK, clean up time!" Well....that fell flat on it's face. Erin would throw a fit because the timer generally has negative connotations (timeout or a time frame to finish dinner). So she would just get overly dramatic whine and cry while Tom and I put away the toys. Jeffrey became more interested with every toy we tried to put away and he'd run to get it back out so he could play with it.

So after a week or so of that I came up with another idea. I let Erin pick out a CD. We play 2 songs really loud and during those two songs it's "clean up time." Erin immediately latched onto it and would run around finding all the toys and bring them to me saying "where does this go mommy?". After 3 or 4 nights she had learned where everything went. Jeffrey was still in the playing with everything phase so getting him to help was a little more difficult. I finally figured that out by giving him one thing and saying, "Hey can you put the airplane back on the shelf buddy?" He'd immediately put it away and come back to me for something else. He knew exactly where to put it also.

So we've made some good progress with this. We knew we had hit gold the other night when I had this conversation with Erin....

Mommy - "OK, let's go up and get jammies on"
Erin - "Nooooooo" (runs to the stairs and buries her head)
Mommy - "Erin I didn't say time to go to bed, I just said let's go get jammies on."
Erin - (peeking up from the steps and sobbing) "But we didn't clean up yet mommy."

That's is she won...we grabbed the World Playground CD, cranked up the volume and put away the toys. Pretty cool huh?