Tickets, Please

Last time I checked, I wasn’t invisible. I mean, I like to think that sometimes I have superhuman type powers, as probably every mom does, but being invisible just isn’t one of the powers I thought I possessed. So when no one in my house listens to a word I say, you can imagine how confused I become. Do they see me? Do they hear me? Are they just choosing to ignore me? And this goes for every single person in my house, from preppy puppy, both mini monograms, and on up to Mr. Monogram himself lately. For example:

Me: Boys, if you want to go see the bunny rabbit before meeting daddy for dinner lets go hop in the car and leave early (my monogrammer has a big fat bunny rabbit that they love to play with when I go over there)

Mini’s: silence

Me: Boys? BOOOYYYSSS? BOOOOYYYYYYSSSS?!

Mini monogram #1: hey mini, you want to share trains?

Me: FIRST MIDDLE LAST NAME OF EACH MINI MONOGRAM, If you would like to see the bunny, please get your flip flops on, get your sippy cups, and lets get in mommy’s car. It is very rude to be late so I do not want to keep Daddy waiting.

Mini’s: silence

15 min later as I’m flipping through the latest Mini Boden catalog…

Mini Monogram #1: Hey mommy, I thought we were going to see the bunny rabbit? We’ve been waiting on you.

EXCUSE ME? YOU are waiting for ME? I have been trying to get your attention for 15 minutes and you’ve been ignoring me, pushing your trains around the train table making choo-choo noises. Was I tuned to the wrong station and you just couldn’t hear me perhaps? Or maybe I had pressed the mute button on my voice remote before I started speaking so you could see my lips moving but couldn’t actually hear me? At any rate, it is time to re-adress the ticket system and the rules of said system. It seems that after they received their last reward for collecting enough tickets, that they lost interest in the system. Or maybe it was I who lost interest in the system. At any rate, all I know is we’re bringing the ticket system back into the spotlight. So sit tight because I promise it's a very "good thing."

Anyone can tell you out there that once your kids hit the old-enough-to bargain- and understand-you age, somewhere around 2 ½, that that’s when the real “fun” begins trying to figure out your children’s hot buttons and what’s going to turn them on and light a fire under their rear end to get them to learn to be responsible and courteous little people. And I will tell you that in my house, we have a zero tolerance policy for rudeness. “Please” and “thank you” were among the first words my children ever uttered, so now at the tender ages of 4 and 2 ½, their manners are like second nature to them. *little pat on my back* However, please don’t get me wrong as we do have our other “issues” shall we say and these issues are (in no particular order) 1-eating vegetables, 2-eating fruit other than raisins or applesauce (I have no idea why, but once my children went from baby food to solids, they decided they would never eat another fruit or veggie again, despite all my pleading), 3-being a good listener (seriously? What is it with the entire male species not listening?), and 4-being nice to your brother (this is a big one with two little guys a mere 1 ½ years apart, which I REALLY don’t recommend BTW. It has really forced me to kick-up my antidepressant meds a bit). So one day I had one of my so-called “brilliant” ideas and decided to impliment a ticket system. So I hopped on to the ever popular Oriental Trading Company site, and proceeded to order 3 of the largest, fattest rolls of carnival tickets I could find, & then about a thousand dollars worth of stickers (okay, so I’m exaggerating, but seriously, it was a lot of stickers). So while I was waiting for the UPS man to deliver my package, I trotted on over to JoAnn’s and for I think about a dollar each, I bought two small vases in the floral section, and then I came home and worked up the best part of the ticket system. THE CHART. Now, you all know monogram momma likes to be very organized and is also quite the little list maker, so I sat down at the computer and made a chart, in a way that a 4 yr old and 2 ½ yr old could “read” and understand, without ever actually being able to read. So here is said chart.

You may or may not be able to tell that I was so serious about this ticket system and chart, that I took it to Kinko’s and had it laminated. Yep, nice and shiny, waterproof, tear proof, and spill proof laminate! Now, once my goodies from Oriental Trading Company arrived a few days later, they boys sat down and got to decorate their own jars however they wanted for our craft time. I put their names on them, but the rest was up to them. So for my boys, their ears perk up like little Labradors whenever I mention the word “train.” I swear, the mini’s will do back flips for a train, and it makes no sense to me since we own LITERALLY just about every single wooden and die cast Thomas train and accessory that Learning Curve even makes. NO JOKE. So that is why, on the bottom of my chart, you can see that 25 tickets = 1 Target (bulls eye picture, genius!) Train (picture of a train). And every time we are eating dinner and I am gently trying to encourage them to just TRY a bite of fruit or vegetable, all I have to do is break out my handy dandy laminated chart, and swish around the tickets in their pretty little jars, and they are like putty in my hands, because they want that train so bad! I will say, however, the category I have noticed the most improvement on with this system, is the “being nice to my brother” category. Again, I just casually hold up the chart, and suddenly no-one is fighting over the 5 Percy trains (because then one person gets 3 and the other only has 2). In fact, they are all but falling over each other to share the Percy trains.

So I know what you’re thinking and that is, that not all of you have small children, or children at all. But you know what? As I'm sitting here thinking about my never ending "to Do" list and things that need to be done around the house, I am thinking I just might implement a ticket system for Mr. Monogram too. And that is certainly another option for you with your own husbands and their yet to be finished “honey-do” lists, no? So go on, head to Kinko's and laminate your own ticket system charts, and be creative with your own reward and I all buy guarantee you'll start noticing a lot more things being marked off that list!