Travis and I are tired of the older children not listening so we have decided that as long as they are not listening they will have to wait that much longer to get what they want. They may want to play, watch a movie, eat dinner whatever that may end up being they are going to have to wait until they have listened and completed the task at hand.
The big struggle of the day was cleaning their room. I had let them know that they were not to get every toy and book out and make a huge mess. When they do this they get so crazy and naughty that they fight and then never want to clean up the mess. They were also informed that if they did get all the toys out and not listen to their mother's words they would pay the piper.
I went in about 15 minutes after they were told of the rules and it looked like a bomb went off. I wanted to rip my hair out. It was so bad that I couldn't get one step inside the door without stepping on several toys. I reminded them that they were told not to do this and that they were going to have to stay in their room until it was totally cleaned up. I let them know that if they took a long time they were going to have to wait that much longer to eat their lunches. This did not go over well.
There was crying, yelling, and Claire was trying to explain why she couldn't be late to lunch. I calmly explained that they knew the rules and that they knew what would happen if they decided not to listen to them. I left them to clean and went in every 15 - 20 minutes to check on them and remind them what they needed to do. It took them 2hours to completely clean up.
This all started at 10:30am. Normally they have eaten lunch by 12:30pm and Ben has gone to take his nap. Since I was trying to drive home the point that they were going to start listening or pay the consequences I let the daily routine slip a little and they didn't even start eating until 12:40pm. While they were eating I had I love Lucy on in the background and Sam had started screaming. I was trying to clean up the kitchen and looked up to see Ben asleep at the table using his pizza as a pillow. I do not know how he managed to sleep through it all.
