Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Clean Up? You've got to be kidding!

Today I began working on cleaning up with William. I have tried and failed a few times before, but I realized today that I MUST do it now. Will had just dumped out an entire large bin of blocks onto the floor. He played with them for all of 3 minutes and then ran off to get a book he wanted me to read him. I realized the timing was perfect! I told him "Will, we have to clean up the blocks and then we can read." He looked at me for a moment, picked up 3 small blocks, flipped over the container, and threw them in. Then he gave me a look that simply said "There. I did it." He shoved the book at me and asked "Please, read?" I told him "No, we have to finish cleaning." He insisted that the cleanup was complete and I must read this book to him NOW! So the great battle of wills began! He ended up on his little time out chair, and when even that wasn't enough to convince him I was serious, I simply used his little hand in mine to complete the clean up. You would have thought I was killing him. While I was making him help me he maintained the posture of a piece of cooked spaghetti, he was doing everything in his power to make me see how incapable he was of cleaning up. He screamed his way through the whole thing, and at the end I brightly thanked him for helping and grabbed the book and read it twice. I can see now that I really have to focus on this. We have let it go too long. I am trying to decide how I should do clean up from now on....once in the morning and once at night? I certainly don't think I could ever be one of those people who makes them clean up after each activity. I don't even do that, so I can't expect my kids to. We'll see.

2 comments:

Ms. Leigh said...

we clean up before bath time. That is the only time. I figure every morning we get a fresh start.
And when I say WE, I mean ME and Booker thinks the toys should be played with as I touch them all.

Little Blessings said...

Good luck. Clean up is never fun. I avoid it like the plague. ALthough my house generally looks like a bomb went off, so maybe I am not a good person to ask :)