Tired of Nagging your children?!

I am sure that no one ever has trouble with nagging their children to do something or to stop doing something! Well as awesome as my kids are I ask them to stop doing something or to go do something over and over and over. So I'm trying something new. I read an article about a mom who put "stop" signs around her house to remind her kids to do things. She stopped reminding them to put their clothes in the dirty clothes box or clean their trash out of the car. If she had to go and pick up clothes on the floor etc she simply tore of an "oops!" strip from the bottom of the page. At the end of each week the kids were rewarded for each "oops!" strip still on the paper. For example each "oops!" strip was worth 10 minutes of TV time (which was a real treat at her house). When she saw keeping the room clean etc was becoming habit she moved her stop signs to another area that needed work. So I've decided to try it out. We have a problem with "potty" talk and name calling so I've hung a "stop" sign from the fan in the living room. (not attractive at all and kind of in the way but that's the point, everyone can see it) The kids have been told anytime I hear inappropriate language I will rip off an "oops!" sign. I also hung one in the doorway of the closet to remind them to make their beds and keep the room clean. Each of my "oops!" strips is worth 5 minutes of playing the WII. (They love doing this) They were excited to see how much time they could earn to play. So no playing during the week just on saturday after minutes have been totaled. In fact they started picking up their room before I even finished my explanation. So we will see how it goes! If you have any ideas for rewards let me know. I'm looking for rewards that each strip can be worth so for example. Each strip left over is one piece of candy (ie tootsie rolls) they can have when we go to the movies. If you try this at your house let me know. I'd be interested to see how it works!

Who can not love this face. It has been fun to see him developing his personality.

We went to the park and got our first snow cones of the season! The kids loved them. McCall got a cheesecake flavored one. I've never tried one of those but it definitely tasted like cheesecake!!

So here's another update on McCall for those who are wanting to know. We had a visit with the doctor at Primary Children's this week and he showed us pictures from her MRI done in April. Hopefully you can see/understand my picture. I have her 2 lungs and heart and then the yellow space is the lymphatic malformations. She has one VERY large mass and then some smaller ones around it. The largest one measures at 46.4mm. (YIKES) To give you an idea of how large that is (the doctors fist is 6cm) this one is about the size of a lemon. The smaller ones I'm guesstimating are maybe the size of cherry tomatoes. We are waiting to get preauthorization from insurance before they do surgery. So hopefully it will get taken care of this june. Then she will have to go for an ultrasound and most likely another surgery in 5-6 months. The doctor thinks he will most likely have to poke her at least twice for them to go away. Basically fluid is extracted from the mass with a large needle and then medicine is injected into them to help them to shrink and eventually go away! Let's hope the doctor has good aim so he doesn't poke any organs he's not supposed to. We really think we got the job where we are so that we would eventually meet up with this particular doctor. We've been passed around to several people but this guy works quite a bit with these malformations but has only been at this hospital a little over a year. He said only him and 2 other doctors in this region can do this surgery. The next closest doctor is in Denver and that doctor is $25 grand more expensive. So these malformations came about because when she was in the uterus something didn't connect right and because of that these started to grow. McCall has been a trooper but we have wondered how much of the conversations she understands/hears things like needles and doctors. She has started having bathroom trouble despite being potty trained and she cries out when she is sleeping, like she's scared or something. I don't know if it's related to what's going on but maybe. I would just really like to get all this taken care of quickly and not have it looming over my head to worry about! Here's to hoping all goes well and she will only have to be poked for one surgery!