Honestly, you think you’re doing something simple, and it blows up in your face…

This weekend, we decided to take a chance and take away the alarm we have at the end of the kid’s hallway – its been preventing them from wandering around at night, and getting into the pantry/fridge.  Just as a trial.

Sure enough, L got hold of a bunch of food.

Then, we thought, “hey, lets use this as a teaching opportunity!”.  We told L that if he didn’t steal that night, he’d get 4 nickels (big bucks in our home) – and if he didn’t steal the whole week, the whole family could go out for ice cream (now getting the whole family invested in L’s success).

The next morning – hurrah!  No stealing!  Woo hoo!  4 nickels!  Happy dancing all around!

Until 11pm at night when we found him with 4 ice cream sandwiches and a diet coke.

So… went to my favorite forum asked for some advice.  The advice that I got back is that really, this isn’t stealing.  Its just kids getting into food.  Take the bad food out of the fridge, let ‘em do whatever they want.

Seemed reasonable to me.  Told the kids they could have whatever they want out of the fridge, whenever they want it.  Just can’t use the microwave or toaster.

First night – they could not sleep, because they figured they had to wait till we went to bed to go to the fridge.  Set them straight, they made a beeline for the fridge, got mac and cheese and an orange.  They were delighted.

Not bad, I thought.  This just might work!

But the next day, M was exhausted, because of the whole “not sleeping” thing.

Second night, they go to bed just fine.  But at 4:30am, I smell toast.  There’s toast, butter, jelly all over the place.  At 4:30 AM.  At that moment, I realized this was a bad idea.  But now, the kids can’t go back to sleep.  And they made darn well sure that we couldn’t either.  Did I mention this was happening at 4:30 AM?

So now the kids are crazed with exhaustion (as are my husband and I – somehow, N slept through it all), the plan is a total failure, and the alarm’s going back on tonight.

I tell you, this morning, it seemed like all hell had broken loose. But when we dissected what happened, it was just the result of a chain of small events that built on each other.  Sometimes, you have to step back and look at what happened in order to realize that really, hell did not break loose.  Sometimes, small things build into bigger things, but will still only require a small change to reset things back to normal.

Whatever that is!