Stick Impolsion

The sticks. Oh, the sticks. It's been awhile since I updated you on the sticks. Sigh. The sticks have imploded.

We were doing fairly well with them until Dave's schedule got so busy around March that the ability to enforce the work was very hit or miss. We are basically living the lifestyle of two full-time working parents with the added bonus of having the kids home all day instead of at daycare. The house is woeful and we are too busy and too tired to fix it.

The main reasons I implemented the sticks were to control the socks all over the house and the chaos in their room. The house is in such a state that finding their stray socks is difficult. Since we were not inspecting daily, or even every other day, their room quickly descended into something that a quick pick-up would not fix. Since their room was a mess, I stopped even pulling the sticks.

I didn't exactly announce that I wasn't going to pay them for brushing their teeth and feeding the cat. I just pretty much stopped paying them. They would ask and I would say we would figure something out later. It's not later yet.

They still do certain chores when asked, like the trash, with less fuss than they used to because these particular chores are linked in their minds to the sticks. But the daily habit of completing a list of jobs without asking is pretty much gone now. Sigh.

I intend to revisit the sticks once we get settled again, but with the changeover to homeschooling and my resignation coming soon, the job list probably needs completely reworked anyway. At this point, I don't expect to even try to reboot the stick experiment until October at the earliest. In the meantime, if you come and visit my house, don't be surprised to find dirty socks in the living room, very full trash cans, and a girls room where the carpet is buried under piles of their stuff.