Sticker charts and shopping with Allie

After many, many nights of little ones running into our bedroom at 1:00 AM, Rich and I decided to reinstate the sticker chart method of parenting. I did add three additional categories to the chart. (When I told the girls that I did this, Allie asked, "What's a category?") Here's what you need to do in order to earn stickers in our house:

1. I slept in my bed by myself ALL night.
2. I didn't ask Mommy to sleep in my bed with me.
3. I helped clean up my toys.
4. I listened to Mommy and Daddy at bedtime.

We saw a major improvement that first week. The actual adding of stickers has been a little lax but the girls get it. I do cut them some slack (just some, not every night) on the sleeping by themselves thing because they are only four years old and they do have bad dreams and get scared. Anna had a tummy ache one night, which is common because of the excess fluid draining from her shunt.

Whenever the girls ask about going to Disney again, I tell them that their charts need 200,000 stickers and then we will go.

I needed to run some errands on Saturday and I wanted to bring one of the girls with me. This would make it a bit easier for Rich and allow me some special time with one of my sweeties. I thought I would take either Em (because she's been having some issues with school) or Anna (because of her recent independence issues) but I needed to pick up a birthday present for one of Allie's classmates.

After Em broke down Friday night because I was leaving to get my hair cut, I told her that she could come with me but on Saturday she decided to stay at home to play outside. Allie insisted on going with me because she wanted to pick out the birthday present for her friend. Wouldn't you know that Em flipped out 30 seconds before I walked out the door because she wanted to go too. Four year olds can be indecisive.

So I had to leave with Em crying. Which made me feel like crap but there was no way I could go with two of them because I had a limited time frame. Rich says that she got over it.

Allie and I had the greatest time together. She was so cute and animated and well behaved. One of our stops was Old Navy in order to search for black gym shorts for the girls' gymnastics show. I found some but wanted to make sure they weren't going to slide off so I told Allie to take her shoes off so I could try the shorts on under her dress. She gave me this 'seriously, Mom' look. It's a good thing I had her try them on because the 2T was too big. We went with teeny baby sizes.

As she was trying on the shorts, she said, "But Mom, when are we going to go back to the purple sandals?" We searched the store but they didn't have any purple sandals in her size so she picked out red cowgirl boots instead. Mommy loves retail therapy so I bought them for her.

Here's the conversation Allie and I had on the drive home:

Allie - "It's a good thing we didn't have sissies with us."

Me - "Why do you say that?"

Allie - "Because I can talk."