For me, as a parent, whoopin' or spanking, is the last resort and it should be to you too. That's unless you have one of those children that are B-A-D( I think that's gonna be my youngest boy when he gets older). Tuesday, I picked Abbey up from school & when we got home I quickly discovered she had cut a diamond shape in her school shirt. They wear uniforms so this is a uniform shirt. It's a 3 button polo type shirt with the school's name & logo stitched on the left hand side. The cost of the short-sleeved shirt is seventeen dollars and (I wanna say) eighty five cents. After tax it's nearly twenty dollars so you understand why I was hot under the collar (no pun intended). I asked her what happened, & she started telling me this story about a boy doing it & she was stammering & so I just stopped her & reminded her of our house policy. If you lie it's an automatic whoopin'. So, like I said, I stopped her mid elaborate sentence & said "so if I call your teacher, she's gonna tell me that you didn't do it, that a boy in class did it?" I could practically see the wheels turning in her mind. She was weighing the likelihood of me calling her teacher & realized there was a 98% (cause I was upset) chance of me calling & a 2% chance of me forgetting it all together. She didn't like those odds & she told me the truth. She cut the shape out of her shirt. I told her I was gonna tell her Daddy. That immediately invoked tears cause she hates to disapoint her Daddy. All through homework I kept bringing it up. Here's where the guilt & shame come in. I told her she ought to be ashamed at how disrespectful she was being to her Daddy, by doing what she did. Her Daddy works hard everyday to be able to afford school uniforms. Mind you, this is all done in your regular speaking voice, not yelling or being animated & always while shaking your head back and forth. Finally Daddy came home. His disapointed voice is even better than mine cause he's naturally softspoken. He told her five shirts cost one hundred dollars & I interjected that, that was half the amount of the dollhouse she wants, to really bring it all into perspctive for her. Hetold her you mine as well take a twenty dollar bill, crumple it up & put it in the trash. So I got a dollars worth of quarters out of my purse & asked her if she wanted it. She didn't say anything at first, I know she thought it was a trick. I asked her again do you want this dollar & she she said yes. I asked her what she would like to buy at the dollar store with that dollar. She slowly started naming stuff she liked at the dollar store. A pair of High School Musical socks or lip gloss, maybe some candy. As she was naming things she started to come out of her funk. I'm sure she was thinking this was an odd outcome, getting rewarded for doing something wrong. When she was done naming things i told her to get up & go put that dollars worth of quarters in the compactor trash. She slowly got up, mouth poked out, and put the quarters in the trash. I had just dashed her dreams of Hannah Montana & High School Musical socks. Brian (Daddy) reminded her that her other 3 new uniform shirts still had not come in, so she would be washing her one good shirt by hand. She was none to pleased with that outcome but we were.
Tip: If you have a Dollar Tree in your neighborhood & you haven't been there, go. Everything there is really a dollar & they have good stuff. I wouldn't use the washing powder & their version of Pine Sol is useless but the rest of their stuff is great. I've bought all my other cleaning supplies there for about 3 years now. As well as snacks & Juice for the kids. They have juice boxes that are 100% juice & they also have, (for children who don't like water) Junior water. It's water with a hint of fruit flavor that's organic & has 100% vitamin C. Abbey loves it & its hard to get her to drink water. I use it as a treat for Brother cause he likes water.
No comments:
Post a Comment