chocolate chip cookies

Sometimes my brilliance amazes even me! I needed the playroom cleaned- actually more than cleaned, i needed us to go through the toys. On Monday night we were at my parents house and the boys are able to play with the toys there, AND more importantly are able to put the toys away.

I am not sure what the malfunction is at our house- ok if I am being painfully honest, I could make a few guesses....
1. I am not an organized person, there I said it. I do not understand organization and I am too tired most of the time for organization.

2. I am never quite sure when is the right time for clean up.
If the kids have to clean up whenever they are done playing- then we would be cleaning up a lot...remember the boys have a 10 minute attention span on a good day- so often they go from playing, to watching tv, to playing music on the computer and back to playing....if we cleaned up each time we took a break from playing all we would be doing all day is "setting up to play".
So then when do we draw the line and make it clean up time? At the end of the day, we have 1.5 hours together and in that time we have to make dinner, eat dinner, clean up dinner and do homework and then on a good day we have time to play. I would rather take all of the playtime and let them PLAY rather then use half of the 15 minutes for clean up.

3. Clean up leads to fighting and stress and at the end of the day I am too tired for that.

So tonight....I stumbled upon it. I needed to go through the play room and according to M, the boys NEEDED to bake cookies.....so we made a deal. If they would clean, I mean REALLY clean, the playroom, then we would bake cookies.

So here we are, 3 garbage bags later, a positive experience cleaning the play room, AND 2 dozen chocolate chip cookies later....now all I am hoping is that when I wake up in the morning you can still tell that we spent almost an hour cleaning!