Wednesday, January 28, 2009

My Secret Weapon

In my arsenal of motherhood tricks, my new secret weapon is FRUIT SNACKS! I know, I'm pretty ruthless. I started using these to potty train #5. He quickly eased from getting a fruit snack for each successful toilet trip to getting one whenever he had a successful dry pants check. Now he gets one or two per day for dry pants. Recently, he has become terrified of the full moon. When the moon was too bright, he would climb into bed with #2. That turned into nightly trips to her bed because he claimed he was scared of everything. So #2 wasn't getting restful sleep. Then I remembered the fruit snacks. If he stays in his bed all night, he gets one in the morning. Mind you, it's not one baggie; it's one fruit snack from the baggie. So with my four boxes of fruit snacks that I bought on sale, I figure we're good for at least six months. Hopefully by then he will have forgotten to be scared at night. It's working so far!

5 comments:

Nate said...

We've had to bribe Amy to stay in bed too. We tell her she gets Prize One if she stays in her bed all night. The cool thing is, you have to earn Prize 3 to get an actual prize, and she's never good enough to earn three prizes in a day. So she's thrilled with her Prize One and I never have to give her anything at all. Whaaaa Haaa Haaaa

Jenni said...

Ya, sometimes I have to bride Jake with brownies to get him to plan our seminary lesson... chocolate's very convincing!

Charlotte said...

I have never thought of doing this. I do a "do it every night for a week" approach, but after the week Joseph is going to siblings' beds again. All I have to do is decide on a suitable edible treat and I am going to give this a go!

Mary said...

Jenni--Was that a Freudian slip? You two love birds are so cute!

Debra said...

Brilliant. That's at least one trick I've figured out--the "rewards" can be extremely small but still pack a punch.