Teaching Your Kids Responsibility is Not Fun: The Spatula

St. Patrick's Day shirts from Miga

Dear KK,

Sometimes I envy you in your stage of Motherhood.  You get to baby a sweet little girl and not worry about teaching her responsibility - YET.

T Bear is almost six.  We are entrenched in the efforts to teach him responsibility but it is not fun.  It is more like war and I hope the winner will allow peace in the home.

Last Sunday, at dinner time everyone was a little hungry and grumpy.  T Bear was asked to go find Grizzly's beloved spatula.  After a few minutes, T Bear returned from the garage with a beat up and broken spatula.  After asking what had happened, T Bear confessed to whacking to the spatula against the concrete until it broke.  T Bear was immediately sent to his room while anger boiled in our already hungry and agitated bodies. After our bellies were full, and our minds a little cooled, we decided that T Bear would need to replace the beloved spatula.

I knew this was the responsible thing to do as a parent, but I was not happy about it.  This week was Spring Break and I wanted to play with my boys all week.  Instead I knew that I was being sentenced to making ("helping") T Bear earn enough money and then taking him to the store to buy a spatula.  

KK, I hope that Jane is different than other kids and likes to work and earn money.  T Bear does not.  He likes money, but doesn't like to work for it.  Let's just say there were many painful hours on Monday and Tuesday of trying to get T Bear to work.  I even used a job app on my iPad to entice him to choose jobs, stop whining and work quickly.  

Finally I was able to text Big D: "T Bear has to 1 more dollar..."

Big D texted back: "Nice...I bet that hasn't been enjoyable for you."

Oh no, it was definitely not.  Tuesday evening we went to Fred Meyer.  T Bear had exactly $5.99 for their cheapest spatula.  The cashier was not amused as T Bear dumped out his pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters to pay only for a spatula that his baby brother was already sucking on in the shopping cart.  I thought it was a pretty entertaining scene.  

That night at dinner we talked about the "spatula experience."  We think T Bear learned from it all, but we are not 100% sure.  Regardless, I wish we could say we are done teaching him responsibility, but we are far from it.  It would have been so much easier for me to just buy another spatula.  But life is not easy, we all need to learn (even me as a parent). 

Right now I am happy that Grizzly will have a spatula to pacify himself during the dinner hour tonight!

-Miss T

Dancing to Celtic music

PS - Right now T Bear is building a racing car with Duplos.  He came up to me and said, " Do you like my virgin?  My virgin rocks!"  I tried to corrected him - VERSION.  But he keeps says "virgin."  Just giggling about it......