Working with Deidra...

Sometimes she does so well and other times it seems like she hits meltdown. Granted, we have been working with her on a couple different things lately and I understand that she's a child and heck we all have meltdowns now and again. Here is what we are working on with her and I continue to ask for guidance with rewarding and disciplining her.

#1 sleeping in her own bed throughout the night. She'd always come in our room between 2-4 am and want to snuggle and she was always either kicking Andy or I out of bed with her changing positions or rubbing her feet against us or throwing her legs over us. We finally decided that we were going to have to come up with a way to keep her in her own bed. She's been doing really well with it (reward chart) and last night was the first night in a couple of weeks that she tried to come in our room.

#2 was with her clothes. Ever since she got grounded last week and had to do her own laundry, she's been doing really well at picking her clothes out and getting dressed and she hasn't given me any problem at all. She gets dressed really easily, she isn't changing her clothes over and over again each day. Fast forward to this morning...I'm in the middle of doing some of her laundry up. She picked her Valentine's Day shirt to wear and I told her she could wear her pink jogging suit pants and it would match quite nicely. She didn't want to wear those so I told her to pick some pants out of her drawer. She couldn't make a decision for the life of her. She just sat there looking....so I told her it was either those pants, another pink pair of sweat pants, or her cream colored pants. Again, she just sat there. I told her if I counted to 3 and she couldn't pick something, that I was going to have to pick it. We counted to 3 and still she just sat there. I finally got up and picked her jogging suit pants and put them on her. Immediately the whining started "Mom, those are ugly." Keep in mind that a few weeks ago, these were all she wanted to wear. She did get dressed in them for me but the whining escalated into a fit. I told her she needed to get ready better for me again and she kept fighting me. So, she earned herself another grounding from tv after school. After that, she calmed down and finished getting ready for me pretty easily. On the way to school, she said "Mom, I was better am I still grounded?" I told her that yes, she was. I got the "your mean." answer in reply. But, she's got to learn that there are consequences from her behavior so the grounding sticks. No matter how much it breaks my heart sometimes to have to discipline her.

#3 is something I started this week with our home study just around the corner. I give the house a good scrubbing once a week (minus the past couple of weeks since things have been so busy). I should say that I try to give the house a good scrubbing once a week. Some weeks get away from me. Anyway, I finally decided that in the evenings, I set the timer for 15 minutes and we all clean for those 15 minutes. The house looks pretty decent after doing that. If Deidra starts whining and refusing to help 5 minutes gets added on. It's been going pretty good this week and the house is pretty clean with what only seems like little effort. I plan on going through today and giving it a good scrubbing and mopping the floors up too. I plan on keeping this one though...it helps take the pressure off of me. I love a clean house, but since this house is so little...it tends to clutter pretty easily and that stresses me out. If we can keep it clean by just a few minutes a day with all of us cleaning, that will majorly help me out. I think we all tend to function better with a clean house anyway.