Written Monday night:

On the agenda:
This week is shortened due to Labor Day. But I still have high hopes for accomplishing much. I’ve been on a roll lately. I painted my kitchen the day after I canned turkey. Then painted my family room and hung pictures {finally}. Powder room downstairs is semi-decorated. It’s feeling good to get some things done. I have also organized my kitchen almost all the way. YEA!!! It has stuck for almost a month now so I think that my new organizing system may just be the ticket.

Speaking of tickets. Ryan just got served tonight and will now be forced to pay one of his many, many, many photo radar tickets. My feelings about photo radar are bitter and deep. Very deep. So deep that they can’t be written.

Next Day {Tuesday}:
Did I say high hopes last night? I meant un-high hopes. I meant this week I am sans hopes. I am okay with that. Such is life. This morning we got off and running. Several times during the morning craziness I reminded Crayton and Piper that their rooms needed to be cleaned. By cleaned I meant picked up. They were clear on that. Expectations set. No room for misunderstanding. They got ready and left for school after assuring me that their rooms were cleaned. What good kids I have. So obedient.

After they left for school I went into Crayton’s room to put something away and I walked into a pit. This did not meet or exceed my expectations. It was a pathetic excuse for a clean room. I dejectedly walked down the hall to Piper’s room and was a little bit relieved to see that she caught on to what it meant to have a clean room. Sort of. There were some things that definitely didn’t jive with my definition of picked up. Cups on the dresser? Come on. chotskies shoved on the shelf? Yuck. Hamper in the center of the room with dirty clothes draped over and around it? Puh-lease! And this room looked 100 times better than Crayton’s room did! These kids needed some instruction. {For the 500 millionth times}.

It was not on my agenda today to go to the school and pick them up to bring them home to clean their rooms. It was a huge pain in my butt. I could have cleaned their rooms for them but decided against it. I instead checked them out of school and brought their sorry {not sorry in the sense that they felt remorse {yet}, but sorry in the pathetic looking/acting sense} behinds home. They were very unhappy with me for my decision to bring them home just to clean their rooms that were 'perfectly cleaned' just this morning. They argued, they moped, they groaned, they got teary. I assured them that they weren’t in trouble, but have obviously not been properly trained in the way of cleaning a bedroom. I apologized to them for my short comings and promised to teach them patiently what a clean room looks, feels, and smells like. They remained mopey, and teary, and frustrated the duration of our cleaning/ re-training session. I remained calm and patient {I think that earned me a pound of gold leafing for my mansion in heaven} Upon the completion of the training, I realized that they needed to hurry back to school because I needed to pick Lennon up from preschool. {So much for getting anything done that I needed to get done this morning during my “me” time}. Piper told me that her class was eating lunch right now and she would be too late to get any lunch. No problem. I’ll make them peanut butter and honey sandwiches to eat on the way. Problem: moldy bread. We were in a hurry so I wasn’t thinking clearly. Instead of grabbing Clif bars for them or making the sandwich on one of 10,000 hot dog buns left over from Labor Day, I panicked. Told them to just jump in the car and we would figure it out on the way to school. I struggled with the dilemma of undoing all of my teaching and rewarding them with lunch out. But I couldn’t let them starve. Should I run into the grocery store and buy them something like a head of lettuce and a bag of carrots? I don’t want them to think that vegetables are a punishment. Do I drive through McDonald’s and tell them that the food there is made with poorly treated animals and dirty oil and then make them eat it? I don’t want to do that either. Too harsh. And besides, I’m starving and I don’t want a head of lettuce or a bag of carrots or any thing from McDonald’s. I didn’t do anything wrong, why punish myself? And then I saw the sign. “$.99 Per Slice Lunch Special!” My ability to implement proper parenting techniques was completely overtaken by my own state of near starvation. Pizza it was.

We were almost done eating when I decided to really drive the lessons learned home. I asked “so, guys, what did you learn from this today?”

Crayton with his mouth full said “If you don’t clean your room, you get pizza.” Piper rolled her eyes and said “Crayton! That is not what we learned! We learned that a clean room means all flat surfaces clean. That if you ask us to clean our rooms, and they are not cleaned, we will have to come home and clean them and we will miss out on fun things at school.” Then she glared at him and with another bite of pizza he smiled at me and said “Oh, that too.”

Does anyone know of any parenting classes in the area? I’m missing some key elements to this whole mom thing.