Meet my kindergartner:

Grace on Christmas Eve delivering a letter she wrote to Santa.

She’s lively and lovely. But she’s a stinker too. I love her to pieces.

In January we had her teacher conference and got great news about most of the normal topics. Above and beyond academics there was a comment about how much empathy for others she possessed. My heart burst because I think that is more important than any reading level. But there was one comment which struck us as odd. “Grace is one of the last ones in the classroom and has a hard time getting settled some mornings because she is in such a rush.” said the teacher. We were perplexed. Grace rides the bus most mornings and she has classmates on that bus which means they should all arrive at the same time to the classroom door. Hmmm, we shrugged our shoulders and then tried to make sure she was even more prepared each morning before we dashed off to the bus.

One month later I am prepping dinner for that night. An automated call comes in from the elementary school. This call says that Grace was tardy on that day. I hung up even more perplexed at this news. Grace had ridden the bus that morning. How could she have been late? I wracked my brain that afternoon. I called the school and got confirmation that she actually was marked late.

So Grace got home and all I could get out of her was, “Weeeeelll, I just didn’t want to go to class and start all that work that my teacher has for me everyday. She makes us write so much and it makes my hand hurt.”

When Grace got off the bus in the cafeteria her normal path should have looked like a straight line all the way across the school to the kindergarten wing. Instead, Grace had zig-zagged all around the school visiting the librarian, the second grade hall, going to the restroom in the first grade bathroom. Basically, she had visited everything she could think of to avoid going to class.

So….we had a kindergarten sized problem. After three kids you’d think I would have faced a problem similar to this. But kids have a way of being original. And my dear third child had discovered a new issue we never knew could happen. She’s an original one, that Grace.

For a day or so, this parental unit just sighed. There is no magic parenting manual for things like this. I didn’t want to take the joy of learning out of the occasion. Independence is encouraged at her school. My fiercely independent child used her independence to do the wrong thing unfortunately. The teacher emailed with conference time suggestions to hash out a solution.

And then it came to me at midnight that night…

I went onto DLTK’s Custom Chore Chart website. I set up a chart titled “Bus to Room – ZOOM!”, put a princess on it, the school days on one side and the chore of “getting into class on time” on the other for a time period of two weeks. I sent Grace’s teacher a notice of the plan and then informed Grace of her challenge the next morning at breakfast. The chart was a hit and she was excited. It took her a couple of days to ask what the reward would be at the end of two weeks. My husband and I had been pondering that very topic with no solution. So on the spur of the moment my husband came up with a genius idea in the moment – The reward for two weeks of “Bus to Room – ZOOM!” success would be a date with Daddy. A date where she got to decide what they did, where they ate, and have Daddy all to herself. It was truly genius. It was perfect for our third child who craves all the attention she can get in this busy family. Her eyes lit up and she clapped her hands…we had found her behavioral currency.

And this was the result of the two week challenge:

Off for a date night with Daddy!

So we moved onto week three with a new challenge. There is more to this story…oh so much more.