Take Care

My little Abigail is fully potty trained (day and night) now!!  Yeah for Abby!  She’s super proud of herself and everywhere we go she tells anyone that will listen, “I wear panties.  I big girl now.  I use the potty like a big girl.  Wipe, flush, wash a hands.  No baby pull-ups on Abigail.”  And on and on…Abby’s quite the chatterbox these days.  It’s cute when she tells the grandparents, or her friends.  It’s a little awkward when she tells the grocery bagging person or the bank teller, but I’m glad that she’s proud of herself. 

I decided to use this time of personal grooming triumph to reinforce some and teach other grooming and cleaning habits to the girls.  We’re going to talk about cleaning and caring for our teeth and bodies, and cleaning and caring for our things (toys, dishes, house).

Cleaning and Caring For Our Things

Briana has a self-imposed chore.  At the end of every meal she picks up her plate, and later Abby’s, and throws any remaining food in the trash.  Then she rinses the plate and puts it, and any eating utensils used, in the dishwasher.   Abby usually wipes down her part of the table but is otherwise stuck, buckled in her booster chair.  When we get back from vacation I think I’m going to formalize those 2 tasks (dishes and table wiping) into chores for the girls. 

I’ve also decided that the kids are going to clean up the main playroom and princess room before bed every day.  I’m sure that I should have been doing this since they were born, but I haven’t.  The kids rarely have to clean up their messes at home because it’s just faster for me to do it after they go to bed than to corral them into helping me…and to be totally honest, I don’t clean up the house everyday either.  Since I think that cleaning up after yourself is an important skill for the kids to learn, I’m going to make the effort to let them do it, even if what was a 10-minute task now takes at least 20 minutes.  In order to get the kids to help me, I use the clean up song from Gymboree and their school:

“Clean up. Clean up.  Put all your things away.  Clean-up.  Clean-up.  So we can play another day.  Clean-up.  Clean-up.  Everybody everywhere.  Clean-up.  Clean-up.  Everybody do your share.”

This song for some reason motivates Abby to clean.

Thought I’d add here that Abby is not coming home from gymnastics, this is what she’s decided to wear this afternoon…and you haven’t seen Briana yet…

Our playroom at the end of the day seems to be a daunting task for the kids.  So I tell Briana to break it down into steps.  See something and make a step for you and a step for Abby.  She looks around, “Step 1 Briana: clean up the puzzle pieces.  Step 1 Abby:  get all of the high heels and put them in the princess room”.  She has to tell Abby her step over and over while she puts the puzzle away, but that’s fine to both girls.  Then Briana looks around again and proudly says, “I get a step 2.  Abby you still have to do your step 1.  Step 2 Briana:  Get the cars and put them back in the bin for cars.  Mommy, you get a Step 1.  Step 1 Mommy, get the cups and put them in the sink.”  I oblige.  As long as we all stay at least one step behind Briana she is happy to keep moving through the steps.  I think she likes being the task master and I wish I’d thought of this sooner.  At the end of the first night, the playroom looks better than I thought.

My tips for getting toddlers to help clean up their own spaces after a couple of days of doing it:

1.    Let them assign the order of the tasks – you don’t really care if they pick up the crayons or the books first as long as they are both picked up in the end.

2.    Make sure the room is organized in a way that makes sense to the kids – It went so much more smoothly when Briana could look around and say, “the books go in the book bin” because any time she had to ask me where something should go, I then had to get her back on task.

3.    Describe what you want the room to look like in the end, not the tasks to get there – the kids will get out of cleaning if they can.  If you describe the tasks and forget one, they will fight you on it.  If, on the other hand, you say “I don’t want anything on the floor except if it is too big for you to pick it up.” , you are more likely to get what you want.

4.    Give them praise for the job, specific to the job -  Don’t just say “good job”.  The thanks at the end is a good time to reinforce behaviors that you like.  For example, “I like how you stacked the coloring books in the coloring book drawer instead of just throwing them in.”  The kids will begin to take pride in a job well done.

Some of the bin organization is out the window, but who cares when everything is off the floor and I didn’t have to do it.  The vacuuming, which the kids fight over and use to chase each other around screaming, isn’t quite perfect, but again…it’s done. 

Cleaning and Caring For Ourselves

As you’ve seen, I have started to let Abby start to dress herself.  If you give her enough time, she can usually dress herself completely.  Things may be on backwards or inside out, but for the most part she gets it right.  I teach her the way that I taught Briana when she was Abby’s age – “Look for the letters (the tag), and make sure that the letters are on your back or your bottom.”  And “The Velcro on your shoes folds to the outside of your foot.”  In the afternoons, when we tend to stay home, I let the kids get up from their naps and completely pick out their own outfits and dress themselves.  Some outfits turn out great, and some…not so much (which is why I still have veto for school/camp outfits for Briana and complete control over Abby’s ensembles).

And there’s Briana’s gymnastics inspired ensemble, which Abby was trying to copy I think (Abby had on a skirt too when she started)…though in Briana’s defense she was just looking at the front of the leotard, which is all pink, and trying to match it with a skirt. 

We learned about how to brush our teeth in a fun way (Terrific Teeth blog from January) already.  This week I’m going to go a step further and let the kids brush their own teeth before bed.  In the mornings I will still brush them just to make sure that it’s done well, but at night I’m going to let them learn to take care of themselves.

I also let the kids wash their own bodies in the bath or shower.  I wash their hair because with the amount of hair my kids have, it’s a long process to clean and detangle their hair and it needs to be done well.  I do, however, let them wash Dora mermaid’s and Barbie mermaid’s hair and comb out their tangles so that they get the idea.  I tried to let them wash each other, but that was a surprising mess.  The kids had a blast rinsing each other’s hair by pouring water all over each other, and then bathtime turned into soak-your-sister time.  At least everyone was laughing and not fighting.  The kids are lucky I wasn’t armed with my camera then or I’d have some killer blackmail pics.

Bedtime takes twice as long with all of these new additions, but it’s worth it when after the kids go to bed, I can go right to relaxing and not straightening up.

Speaking of relaxing, I’ll be on vacation next week, so there won’t be a blog.  I’ll be back in 2 weeks and probably scrambling to get back-to-school ready.  Take care this week!

<3 Pedigreed Housewife