little life lesson

If you know anything about Drew these days, you know that he is all about Super Mario Brothers.  And if you don't know, I'm sure that if you spent 4 seconds in his presence, you'd quickly discover this on your own.  He is a new Mario character every day and if you forget to call him by his Mario name, you will be corrected within a matter of .25 seconds.  It is starting to get really old for Mike and I, I kind of can't wait for this phase to be over.  I said the same thing when he was really into Michael Jackson songs.  It was exhausting!  But, we indulge him, I like that he has such an intense imagination and I will NOT discourage him from being creative and imaginative, even if I never want to hear the names Mario, Luigi, blue Toad, Koopa, etc. ever again ;)

We are also using this opportunity to teach him how to earn things that he wants.  He really wants the Mario Smash Brothers game for our Wii.  With Christmas a whole year away and his birthday not until November, we will not just buy it for him, obviously.  So we have come up with a system for him to earn it himself.  

I started a chore chart for him over the summer but I honestly haven't been the best at making him mark his chores off on it.

He does clean up and put away dirty clothes and stuff but we are revisiting this in order to earn his game.  It isn't the cheapest thing in the world and so it will take him a few weeks to work for it.  We aren't quite half way there but it is a work in progress and if we remind him when he disobeys that he is trying to earn his Smash Brothers game, he quickly straightens up.  The other day he was putting on his socks before school when Susanna started distracting him and I heard him say "Susanna, I'm earning my game, I have to put on my socks!"  For Family Home Evening this week, I made another chart to help us keep track of the days and to give him a visual of about how long it will take for him to earn it.

Mike talked to him about responsibility and explained to him why we won't just buy it for him outright.  We talked about working hard and earning money and we talked about the differences between things we want and things that we need.  Hopefully something stuck, because he was more interested in his cookies at the time.  And as you can see from the chart, he did not earn his "gold coin" for that particular  Monday because he was totally disobedient when it came to our bed time routine.  Now he has a whole extra day he has to tack on at the end to make up for it.  Oh the joys of disciplining kids...its a tough job.  But I'm hoping we can instill in him a desire to work hard for the things that are important to him, and right now, Mario is at the top of his list!