Punishment and Chores

New rules have been instigated at the Jacobson house recently. Due to the dramatic increase in injury inducing physical encounters between my children, I decided that the timeouts I was administering before were in effective, and new tactics were needed. Recognizing that my children have been better able to retain lessons in general when they are of a more physical nature, I decided to give a chore to the person who did the hurting. As a result, my house has been much cleaner. :) At first I was worried that this would have a negative impact on their view of doing chores in general, (as in associating chores as a punishment) but this has not been the case as of yet. We'll check back in 20 years when they start blaming me for my bad parenting. I haven given up on chore charts and incentives because I can't keep up with them and the chores become all about the reward ("I don't really want the money/candy/activity that much so I'm choosing not to do the chores" is not acceptable behavior to me. Chores get done because they need to get done, so get off your bum and do the work!) and I often would see chore charts incomplete for days and my positive reinforcement would go down the drain and I would resort back to yelling, crying, throwing tantrums etc. As a result we've kind of moved into doing chores on a need basis, such as "Your room needs cleaning, go do it. The living room needs to be picked up, everyone help. The dishwasher needs unloading, go do it." I want to start Saturday chores soon, where there are expected weekly chores, but that would require us to not have to go anywhere on Saturdays more often....which has been the case way to often lately. It's not a perfect system, but it's working fairly well now. But the punishment with chores has had an unexpected side effect. They KNOW the punishment is a chore when they hurt someone, and so when I assign the chore they stomp off and go do it, almost always with no whining! The other benefit is that when I assign chores for them to do when things need to get done, they are starting to pull together faster, work together a bit better, and the work gets done sooner. This is not every time, but the trend is on the rise. So a cleaner house, less whining, and a faster start to finish time means a win, win, win situation for me! .........knock on wood.

He doesn't have to do chores, and rarely gets punished, so I thought I would add some pictures of his cute fatness.

American Fork Half Marathon

 Yes, I jumped for the sheer joy of running in the middle of running the half marathon. And when I saw my family at the finish line I got the BIGGEST grin on my face gave them high-fives instead of my normal head down grimace. And I enjoyed myself. Immensely. Seriously. This race was wonderful, and it gave me renewed faith in racing, which I wasn't sure would happen after my last race, which also happened to be a half marathon. See entry here. That was @#!*% . This was heavenly. Mostly because it was all downhill, and there was no wind, and no hills, and the temperature was heavenly, and I got the time I was trying to get last year (1:59:24) because there were no hills. :)

As I started the race, I had a goal time in mind and so I sought out the appropriate race pacer. Then I soon passed said pacer. So I caught up with the next one, and then passed her. Then I looked at my pace on my handy-dandy Garmin watch I had gotten for my birthday and was shocked to see my cruising speed was right around a 9:00 mile, and I was feeling really good. I didn't feel like I was struggling at all. Heck, I wasn't even breathing hard! So I decided to just...run with it. As I came out of the canyon at mile 7.5, I could tell that the downhill was starting to take it's toll on my quads as they felt a bit shakey. I actually welcomed the even ground for a while. When I got to the last mile, I was shocked to see that if I could run just under a 9:05 minute mile for the last mile, I could get under 2 hours! So I did. It rocked. I came in RIGHT behind the guy carrying the 2:00:00 pace sign. I was able to sprint to the finish. It was totally cool.

The only downside to this event was how my legs felt for three days afterwards (stairs were a screaming, crying, agonizing trial to go down, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I went down backwards on my hands and knees for all the second day) and the fact that I may never run another 1/2 marathon that has hills again. It was just too much fun, and why ruin the ride with challenges like hills?

Millions of pictures

Today I had to ground my oldest daughter from her markers, pencils, and crayons. Why? Because she used the forbidden permanent marker to draw with, knowing well that it was forbidden. How do I know that she knows this rule? Because she said, "Mom, I'm not going to lie. I drew these pictures with daddy's black marker." And then because she told the truth, she assumed she was off the hook. Unfortunately, only for one misdemeanor, not both. After some tears, she accepted this punishment and went out to play. I started cleaning up parts of my neglected house and found a stack of pictures that Evelynn has drawn recently. This is not uncommon. I have three drawers for her to stash her art, and once a year I empty a box with about 15 lbs of used paper to the recycling from her art endeavors, keeping a few select gems. Recently, first grade has taught her to narrate her pictures, so there are some truly awesome explained art floating around. But I digress. I found this stack of pictures and realized that they were from the time when Doug and I went to pick up my parents from Las Vegas, staying a few nights there and in St. George while the kids stayed with Aunt Marrianne. As I leafed through them, I found a common thread. Almost all the pictures were addressed to me, the mother she loved the most and missed very much. It made me pause. So I looked at some other stacks of pictures, and realized that most of these were also addressed to me, the mother she "loves so much!" My birthday pictures were gushing with her affection. Part of me was tempted to be cynical and think "Well, if she claims to love me so much, why doesn't she do xy&z more/less often?" Then a small voice said, "She loves you the most because you're her mom. You are very lucky." Yes, I am. I don't deserve this love, but it has been given to me so freely with the innocence of a child. I hope one day to be worthy of such love.

Eat this today! Well, tomorrow will do...

We made this for dinner tonight in honor of the movie Doug and I are watching later (Avengers!), and it was so good I felt like I had to share. Make it tonight. Or tomorrow will do in a pinch.

Chicken Shwarma
http://theshiksa.com/2012/08/15/chicken-shawarma/?recipe_print=yes

Naan
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/naan/
Please note, I rolled this out REALLY think to make big pieces and then grilled them on the grill along side the chicken, but you can use a cast iron skillet or a regular skillet or whatever, but a good rule to know (which I discovered after making a charcoal flap jack on the first piece) is that they cook quickly!

Cucumber Sauce
1 cucumber grated
1 carrot grated
1 tomato, seeded and chopped
1 jalapeno seeded and minced
4 green onions, chopped
3 cups plain yogurt (thin with milk if desired)
salt and pepper to taste

Combine veggies and place in mesh strainer and sprinkle with salt, let drain 30 minutes. Stir into yogurt, season according to taste.

Wrap the chicken and sauce in the naan, and consume. Holy yumminess. Even my girls loved it!

Running Away with random updates

As I cleaned up oatmeal off my kitchen floor this morning, being careful to get all the stuff stuck under the table legs so they didn't end up glued to the floor, I considered my morning activities thus far. Get woken up at unholy hours (anything where the birds are chirping so loudly that you can't get back to sleep despite how dark it is is considered unholy if it us thrust upon you without your consent, FYI), find the pacifier, wake up again, feed the baby, get breakfast, monitor screaming fights about who's picture is who's, reiterate that you cannot fix Lightening McQueen's battery case, but then give in to two year old logic that daddy can fix it when he gets home, put away the milk, put away the oatmeal, put away the cereal, clean up the popcorn remains from last night, yell that who ever wakes up the baby with their yelling has to finish the babies nap (secretly wishing that it could be me) and then get on hands and knees to scrub the oatmeal....After all this considering, a thought popped into my head. I could run away. I could just get on my running clothes, go out for a run, and never come back... I could. That lady in Pennsylvania did it. She dropped her kids off at school and then sat at the park, probably considering her life up to that point. Then she met a group of hobos heading to sunny Florida and thought, that sounds great, and went with them. Ten years later, she resurfaces. Hmmm....