The Gobble Bag

There has been the best discovery that our family has made in recent history. Surely it won't last, as all good things must come to an end, however, it is working for now and has been such a blessing. In fact, such a good blessing that Katie herself told me that she was grateful for it.

To begin with, for seven or so months, I have been doing an allowance with Katie. She starts out with $5.00 of allowance each month. She has to have her room clean when she goes to bed at night and she has to make her bed and put her pajamas away before she starts the rest of her day. Supposing that her room was clean the night before, her room would be spotless after putting her pajamas away. If she gets it done, she keeps her money. If she doesn't, money gets subtracted. This really worked for Katie. Getting something and then having it taken away was much more effective than not having it and still not getting it.

So this system worked well for awhile and then she didn't care. Partly because we weren't spending what she earned. We have solved that. It is gone and she needs more to buy things that she wants. The other problem was that she just didn't care anymore. She actually went negative in what she earned last month (however, I don't make her pay me, but it was an eye-opener). We have talked a lot about choices and she started to tell me, "it is my choice, moooom!" (Just a small backfire!)

Luckily, that same weekend I was flipping through my LDS Living magazine and saw an article on "The Gobble Bag". We instituted it that night. The Gobble bag is a big black garbage bag at my house. At night, I give the kids warning to pick up anything that they don't want to go in the gobble bag. I guess that I need to move onto the part where it talks about not warning them and letting the bag do the teaching....SCARY! (Now Christian has tried to abuse this and get me to clean up a giant mess because he didn't care if it was gone for a week. I told him for that big of a mess it will go straight to DI/Goodwill for some other kid to enjoy :) ). After they go to bed the gobble bag eats the stuff they didn't pick up. And it goes away until the next Family Home Evening. The first time they got it back the lesson was focused around that issue, so they got the stuff back during, but now I do it before we start and we are still getting ready. They get it back in the family room and if they don't put it away, it goes back in for another week. If it goes in 3-4 times you are supposed to talk about where you are going to give it away. Christian chose to get rid of things the very first night that we talked about it. Apparently, he did not know that this was an option. Katie, who is a bit of a pack rat, even got rid of a few things she didn't want to bother with.

So back to the beginning, I love the Gobble Bag. And because it gave another incentive to keep her room clean, that is why Katie has come to love it too. (She was pretty upset in the beginning, go figure!). The nice thing is that I don't have to worry about groveling and begging for things back. It is gone for a week, the end. There was an incident where someone didn't want to clean up one Saturday. I figured out that they thought they could hold out for a day (we do FHE on Sunday because of Mike's commute). So we revamped that and if it is obvious that they are abusing the system, it is held for an extra FHE. The Gobble Bag is actually hungry this week. WHOA WHOO!