Chart

We have a little system in our house to discourage bad behaviour.

I’m not talking about the tactical use of withering sarcasm that I employ with my husband.

Nor the “If you bite me again I will bite you back harder,” zero tolerance technique that I try on my son. (It’s zero tolerance only in the sense it seems to have zero effect on him).

No, I’m talking about the deeply entrenched and successful Happy Face system for my daughter.

The rules are simple. When she’s good, she gets a Happy Face on a chart. When she’s bad, she gets a Sad Face.

I say chart. It kind of started off that way, but now it’s just in my head because usually I’ve run out of paper, printer ink, or both.

Ten Happy Faces = £2 pocket money on a Saturday. One Sad Face is allowed. Two means no dosh.

It works pretty well. They use something similar at her special school, where if she earns enough points she gets “choose time” or rewards.

Usually, if I’m struggling to get her to listen to me, the threat of that second Sad Face is pretty much guaranteed to grab her attention.

She’ll sometimes squirrel the money away to save up for something big. Or at the moment she’s throwing caution to the wind and insisting I buy her a magazine (If she was more aware of the value of money, I’d swear she was doing this just to get a subsidy as most of these gimmicky kid’s comics are £3.99, anyway).

She’s recently swapped from Dr Who, her favoured publication, to Hello Kitty Magazine.

Yesterday, I found the note pictured at the top of this post.  I've assumed it's a draft of a letter my daughter will no doubt shortly ask me to help her send to the editor of that august publication.

And do you know what? Discovering it, reading it: that gave me a Happy Face.

Video is Evan Dando & Chris Brokaw - Paid To Smile

Video is The Teardrop Explodes - Reward

Perfect

Some of my daughter's favourite books are Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry stories.

If you're not familiar with them, they can be summed up quite simply: they centre around an extremely naughty schoolboy, who is called Henry, and can be very horrid. You could probably have guessed that for yourself.

My daughter, unlike most children, is fascinated by a secondary character. Unlike the vast majority of readers, who dream vicariously of being like the eponymous anti-hero, playing tricks on teachers and getting up to all sorts of mischief, my little girl worships Henry's brother, Perfect Peter. He's a nauseously polite, irritatingly pleasant, Aryan Youth-style, sanctimonious, little sod.

But in my daughter's eyes he's the real hero. I write here sometimes about my girl's rebellious, stubborn streak (see the last entry, Scratch). But it doesn't surface very often. Most of the time she is incredibly well-behaved and delights in doing her homework, getting tokens for good behaviour at school and seeing rows of happy faces added to her reward chart at home.

Her little brother, on the other hand, is rapidly growing up to have - how can I put it? A problem with authority.

The other morning, he was running round the house, yelling, having already been told off for trampolining on the sofa, throwing a DVD like a frisbee, and calling me a 'pooey bum'. (This last one strikes me as not only rude, but hypocritical, seeing as he's only recently potty-trained and still drops the odd log in his pants).

My daughter watched all these shenanigans quietly, looking up from her Horrid Henry book every now and again, with a world-weary expression on her face. And in one of those surprisingly brilliant bursts of vocabulary she sometimes displays, said the following:

"This family, Mum," she said looking around at us all. "And this family," she added, nodding down at her book.  "There are a LOT of similarities."

Video is Feargal Sharkey - My Perfect Cousin

Golden

A scene from my kitchen, yesterday

Have you heard of the Golden Hour? In medicine it’s the time period following a trauma when there is the highest likelihood that urgent medical treatment will prevent death.

In our house, we have our own version of Golden Hour. It’s the time period in the run-up to tea, when there is the highest likelihood that I will murder my children.

Between around 4pm and 5pm, my kids go a little stir-crazy, my blood pressure rises to the point of there being a whistling in my ears as the steam escapes, and I lose the plot.

My daughter, who has had a long day at school, is tired and as hungry as only a person with Prader-Willi Syndrome can be. My son, who has had a long day acting like the crazed offspring of Zebedee and Tigger, is also tired (but - obviously - not quite so hungry).

So what we get is a two-year-old winding up a 13-year-old, usually involving toys used as missiles. My stubborn teenager refuses to budge from her seat on the sofa, her high pain threshold helping her withstand the physical onslaught.

It ends in shouting, bruises, sometimes a bent pair of specs, and usually a retaliatory shove toppling the Toddlinator from the sofa, at which point he runs sobbing into the kitchen protesting wildly about how his sister has pushed him. Quite how he has the chutzpah to be so upset and affronted by an action taken only after enormous provocation, I don’t know.

It’s at this point that I sit down and explain calmly and reasonably to my rapt, attentive offspring how they need to be more gentle and caring with eachother, as they nod solemnly at me and we all have a group hug.

Nah, not really. It’s more like: “WILL YOU TWO SHUT UP BEFORE I POUR THIS BOLOGNAISE OVER YOUR HEADS!” 

Cue more crying, the infuriatingly amusing retort from my boy of: “Don’t shout, Mummy. Be nice”, and the stricken look on my daughter’s face as she wails: “But if you do that, WHAT WILL I HAVE FOR TEA?”

Video is Grant Lee Buffalo - The Shining Hour