Amazon Dollars

Matt and I are the type of people who like to put our own spin on the the traditional.   Life would be much too boring to stick to the standard or status quo.  Our parenting style is no exception to this theme.  Usually children have some sort of opportunity to earn an allowance of sorts but our kids are earning Amazon Dollars.  Apparently, the frequency of my Amazon purchases led some people in our household to believe that everything on Amazon was free.  And thus, the idea of Amazon Dollars was born.  For good deeds, chores, basic good behavior and the like, Luke and Adrienne can earn dollars toward purchases on Amazon.  This has turned out to be a tremendous bribe motivator.  So far, most of the purchases have been Playmobils but Luke is now saving up for a golf cart.  Rest assured, this will never materialize because his Amazon Dollars burn a hole right through the paper they are tallied on and he uses them up rather quickly.  Adrienne, on the other hand, has already learned the reward of delayed gratification.  This little system of ours has been the most successful of anything we've implemented so we are going to stick with it as long as we possibly can.  This "tool" if you will,  benefits Matt and I as well.  For example, I almost forgot my running sneakers as I was trying to get out of the house this morning.  I already had at least 5 bags balanced on my shoulders and coco in tow when I figured out I was missing them.  Luke was standing right there so I said, "Hey Luke, I'll give you an Amazon Dollar if you run upstairs and grab my sneakers for me."  And just like that, I had my sneakers in hand and Luke had an Amazon Dollar. A win-win in my book.

Dressing Up

All I have to say is that my people are cute and full of personality!  Ok, that's not all I have to say.  We went fancy style for Nick and Ashley's wedding last weekend and I have just a few pictures because I literally had my hands full all weekend and was unable to take many pictures.  A quick rundown of how dressing up goes with young children...

 

Luke - at age 8, was excited to be in his "tuxedo" which was really a black suit.  He now wants to wear said tuxedo for school pictures this week.

 

Adrienne - at age 5, if she's not into it, she's just not into it.   Luke was off doing other things and she wanted to be with him and so she almost refused to wear her dress.  She also was upset  because the dress was "itchy and scratchy."  Luckily, she was thrilled to visit the salon to have her hair and nails done and we made sure to tell her she needed to wear the nice dress because her hair and nails looked so nice.  She managed to snag her dress on one of the church pews so I had to quickly remove part of one layer of tulle on the dress.  She could not wait to get that thing off and into her bathing suit for the hotel pool. 

 

Coco - at almost 2, decided she liked her dress but was going to forego any shoes.  So my little pixie was barefoot for the church ceremony but came around and wore her gold sparkle shoes to the reception.

And on top of all that, add in the fact that we had to carry many extra layers on account of the non-cooperating winterish weather!  

 

Luke did a great job as ring bearer and looked so handsome.  Adrienne received many compliments on her beautiful hair and sat nicely in the pew during the ceremony.  In true Coco fashion, she wanted to nurse as soon as we arrived at the church and for the majority of the ceremony that she attended (all of 10 minutes).  We scared some groomsmen with the nursing  and then quickly exited stage left (when the squawking began) and went down to the church basement to play in the sink in the ladies room.  We popped back into the ceremony for the very end then stuck around to wrestle the kids into a family picture with the photographer, who was clearly not amused by the kids. 

 

We made it to the reception and the kids did a few spins on the dance floor (with the background music playing) and then we sent them up to go swimming and had their food boxed up and sent to them.  Lucky for us, Aunty Em played the role of nanny for the weekend! 

 

My closing comments are in regard to Matt.  He had a really humorous and thoughtful best man speech that brought down the house.  He's truly blessed with such natural charisma.  He should've been something akin to a diplomat. 

 

It feels so good to get back to normal life this weekend and to attend to things we've neglected for the last week and a half.  We are looking forward to enjoying the last of the fall weather and then onto all the exciting holidays, including Halloween.