Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Logan lately...

Logan has been so cute lately. So, since he just turned 2 last month, here are a few pictures of the handsome little guy. We sure love him and his sweet little personality :)

Here is one of Logan loving his little brother whom he affectionately calls "beep".



Logan is a boy after my own heart- a great lover of marshmallow popcorn- just like his mother. (I didn't take a picture of the gigantic tears that followed when I had to take the bowl away.)



Another of Logan's favorite things are smoothies, (not to mention the fact that his favorite toy is the blender in which smoothies are made. We leave it unplugged for just that reason.) And this is a picture of what happens when you drink a thick smoothie, TOO FAST. :)



Logan is a creative problem solver. He thinks the can opener opens everything. Olivia couldn't get the crayon box open so Logan, being the "fixer" that he is, gets out the can opener and goes to work.



And last but not least, here is a shot of our sweet little boy, following in the footsteps of his sisters. If one of the girls is wearing a headband, so is Logan. And he likes to wear Ally's lip gloss while she is at school (shhh, don't tell Ally)
And by the way, this is where Logan spends 1/2 of his day, belly-up to the counter, standing on his chair, doing whatever mom is doing.

THINK

Love this!

21 Creative Discipline Ideas

I found this on Pintrest, and I thought it was great! I love the job jar idea for bored kiddos!

It's lengthy, but well worth the read.

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Disciplining our children takes dedication and effort. It also helps to mix in a little creativity when needed. The consequences below from parenting expert, Lisa Welchel, might seem a little strong, but let them inspire you to come up with your own, and pair them with the 7 Steps to Tried and True Discipline.

1. If time-outs don't work, try a "time-in." This can be accomplished by sending your child to a designated spot where he must complete a task that has a definite beginning and end. This could be putting together a small puzzle, stringing 50 beads on a piece of yarn, or tracing the alphabet. A time-in diverts his energies and encourages him to focus on something positive.

2. Timers set definite boundaries. For example, with a timer, you can say, "I'm setting the timer. I want your room cleaned (or your shoes on, or the dishes unloaded) in 15 minutes. If you haven't finished by then, your correction is…." This method not only spurs on easily distracted children, but it also leaves little room for arguing about a job that isn't finished and whether the correction is warranted.

3. Make a homemade "Correction" can and fill it with tickets or slips of paper with various consequences written on them. Instead of giving your child a time-out, send her to the can for a slip. A few ideas might include no TV or computer for a night, early bedtime, or an extra chore. Toss in a blank piece of paper, a "mercy" ticket. This gives you an opportunity to talk about how God gives us mercy even when we deserve punishment.

4. If you repeatedly open the door to your child's room only to catch him in an act of disobedience, take your child's bedroom door off the hinges. It sounds harder to do than it actually is. And it works wonders!

5. Adjust bedtimes according to your children's behavior that day. For each infraction, they must go to bed five minutes earlier, but if they've been good, they can earn the right to stay up an extra five minutes.

6. An especially tough but effective correction for teenagers who forget to wear their seat belts is to add an additional day past their sixteenth birthday before they can take their driver's test. Hey, it's important!

7. If you have dawdlers, try this: Whoever is last to the table at dinnertime becomes the server. But there's a catch. Even if you're first, your hands must be clean, of you'll end up serving the food, pouring the drinks, and fetching the condiments (after washing your hands, of course!).

8. If your children are constantly turning in sloppy schoolwork, get a few photocopied pages of printing or cursive exercises. (These can be found at any teachers supply store.) Then ask your haphazard child this: "What takes longer: a report done neatly in 15 minutes or one you've sped through in 10 that must be redone and warrants a page of handwriting practice?"

9. You've heard the reprimand "Hold your tongue!" Make your child do it-literally. Have her stick out her tongue and hold it between two fingers. This is an especially effective correction for public outbursts.

10. My friend, Becki, tried a variation on this idea in the car. If things got too raucous or there was too much fussing between siblings, she would cry, "Noses on knees!" Her children then had to immediately touch their noses to their knees until she determined that they had learned their lesson.

11. Next time your child "forgets" to put something away, like video games or sports equipment, put it away for him. When he asks where it is, tell him that he'll just have to look for it. Believe me; he will learn that it's a lot more trouble to find something that Mom has hidden than it is to put it away in the first place.

12. If you have younger children who are messy, try this: Put their toys in a "rainy day" box to bring out later. This has the added benefit of making an old toy seem new again. Or set the toy somewhere out of reach but within sight for a predetermined number of days. This increases the impact of the correction by keeping the forbidden toy fresh in their minds.

13. I heard from a mom who had tired of her three sons' ceaseless noises and sound effects—so she got creative. If her boys did not take their commotion outside, she would make them sit down and listen to the "Barney" theme song cassette for 10 minutes. For adolescent boys, it's torture!

14. If your little one gets too hyper, come up with a code word to remind him to stop the action without embarrassing him. Whenever Tucker started getting too rowdy in a group, I would yell, "Hey, Batman." He knew that he needed to calm down before I had to take more drastic measures.

15. Does your child slam the door when she's angry? You might tell her, "It's obvious that you don't know how to close a door properly. To learn, you will open and close this door, calmly and completely, 100 times."

16. If your child likes to stomp off to his room or stomp around in anger, send him outside to the driveway and tell him to stomp his feet for one minute. He'll be ready to quit after about 15 seconds, but make him stomp even harder.

17. The same goes for throwing fits. Tell your child to go to her room to continue her fit. She isn't allowed to come out and she has to keep crying for 10 minutes. Ten minutes is an awfully long time, and it's no fun if your parents tell you to cry.

18. Another way to handle temper tantrums is to simply say, "That is too disruptive for this house. You may continue your fit in the backyard. When you're finished, you are welcome to come back inside." When there isn't an audience, the thrill of throwing a temper tantrum is gone.

19. If a job is not done diligently, have your child practice doing it. She'll learn to be more thorough if she's made to sweep the floor three or four times because her first effort wasn't good enough.

20. When one of my children is acting disrespectful, disobedient, or defiant, I will instruct him or her to choose a chore from the Job Jar. The jobs include scrubbing the toilet, organizing the pots and pans, moving and vacuuming underneath the furniture, weeding the garden, matching up odd socks, defrosting the refrigerator, and cleaning the closet, garage, or under the bed. And those are just a few possibilities. You could add ironing, vacuuming the refrigerator coils, scrubbing the inside of small wastebaskets, polishing the silver, cleaning the window wells, brushing the animals, cleaning the fireplace, shaking the kitchen rugs, vacuuming the couch, alphabetizing the spices, and using wood cleaner on the dining room chairs. Not only does the Job Jar help to get my house clean, but it also keeps my little ones from complaining that they're bored. They know that with the Job Jar, Mom will always have an antidote for boredom.

21. I have a friend whose son's morning chore was to get the pooper-scooper and clean up the doggie gifts littering the backyard. The boy was not doing this job with much diligence, so his father came up with this creative solution: After the boy had completed the task, he would be required to run through the yard barefoot! From then on, their lawn was perfectly clean.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Don't Carpe Diem

Friends, we all need to read this. It is HILARIOUS! And amazingly helpful too. The words every mother probably wishes she could speak. I loved it, I hope you do too!

http://momastery.com/blog/2012/01/04/2011-lesson-2-dont-carpe-diem/#comment-29643

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Funny Kids

I hope you can all get some enjoyment out of the silly little things that my kids do. I post them on my blog more so that I can remember them than anything. Here are a few funny things they did and said today...

Olivia: Dad I'm SOOOO hungry.
Dad: Oh yeah?
Olivia: Yeah! Look at my lips. Can't you see how old and moldy they are?


And then Logan and Nathan were napping, and the rest of us were downstairs. I had the monitor with me so I could hear when the baby woke up. As I am sitting at the table scrapbooking, I hear a tiny whisper coming from the monitor in Nathan's room. It is Logan. He whispers to Nathan,

'baby!' -pause- 'baby!' -pause- 'baby!'

As though he was trying to stealthily wake him up.
I think it's cute that he went to check on Nathan before coming to find any of the rest of us.

And last but definately not least, Logan sticks a cookie IN BETWEEN HIS TOES, and says 'Mom, wah bite?' (Yummy!) Needless to say, I declined. :)

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Heaven sleepies

Olivia likes to sing Silent Night to little Nathan if he starts to fuss. Today while she was singing to him, I listened carefully to the words and when she gets to the part at the end where the words say "sleep in Heavenly peace" she sings...

"sleep in Heaven sleepies".
:)

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Why do we do it?

Today, Sunday, was Stake Conference, for which I was really excited. I always enjoy hearing the visiting authorities talk, and it is nice to only have a 2 hour meeting instead of 3 :) Though, I always wonder how the kids are going to do, sitting in the same place for 2 hours, without primary or nursery to go to. Well, today, I must admit, I was thinking to myself, why am I doing this? And in all honesty, half way through, we ended up leaving. I know, I know, I am a bad mom. But it was getting to the point of being ridiculous! The speakers were great (well, what I actually heard of them) and I was glad to be listening to what I could, but after an hour of fighting kids to be reverent and telling them for the 3rd time to be ladylike and not lay down on the rows, and after taking Logan out 2 times for screaming fits because he wanted ALL the crayons, and after he threw his binky across the room, I simply decided it was time to go. I probably should have stuck it out, but today, I just didn't have it in me.

In all honesty, I think that most Sundays. If it were just me, I would be ecstatic, to get ready each Sunday and go be spiritually fed. But getting 4 little bodies (plus myself) bathed, dressed, fed and hair done in time, then sitting with them for an hour in sacrament meeting, trying to teach them how to be reverent is most times overwhelming.

So I ask myself, why do we do it? And here is the conclusion I have come to. We do it because it is true. The gospel of Jesus Christ is true, and it is vital to our children that they learn of Him, and gain a testimony of and faith in His teachings.

So, I guess for the time being, I will just be thankful that it isn't worse, and that my husband isn't in the bishopric or something like that where I would get to do it all by myself. :) And hope and pray that my efforts are not in vain and that something good is sinking into their little brains, and forming a little testimony that will someday grow into a deep faith in Christ.