Try again

With the new school term we started asking the twins to get themselves dressed in the mornings. They are highly capable to do this and can get it done in 2 minutes when they want to. However… it’s never that simple, is it?

We’re now a month and a half in and there’s probably been 2 times for each twin when they have gotten the job done without any drama, and no, of course it was not the same mornings. Not only that, but pretty much every morning doing this has been highly hectic.

There are a few recurrent reasons for this. At the top of the list with a 50% rate would be getting distracted by each other and start to play instead of getting dressed. A solid 20% goes to getting stuck (literally) with one of the tasks (i.e. getting their hand lost in the sleeve or the two legs in the same pantleg), with the frustration from this turning them into raging gremlins. About 10% goes to them not liking the clothes and another 10% to them starting a fist fight because she looked at him wrong or he "touched [her] Frozen bedsheets". The last 10% goes to "[they] simply don’t want to".

It was becoming quite the challenge since all 4 of us are trying to get ready and leave the house for school and work every morning, so I decided to resort to one of the old school techniques and make a reward chart. This was a simple A4 sheet printed from my PC with a 4 column table where we’d put on stickers for each time we successfully got ready in the morning without anyone getting injured or having a mental breakdown (standards are pretty low). Once they’d reach 3 stickers, we’d get a treat such as a jelly or some chocolate. To make the goal very clear I also got a magnetic strip (they called it a checklist) with visuals of what had to happen exactly for this sticker to be awarded (clothes on, shoes on, get in the car,- simple), and every time a step was completed the visual could be turned around. Pretty straightforward, we were full of hope.

This is how it actually went…

The initial reaction was good, they welcomed the new initiative and were quite excited about the checklist, as well as the treat, of course. However, when the moment of truth came everything turned around fairly quickly.

She was outraged that all the visuals showed “only boys”. Fair enough. The pack I bought actually contained many visuals for different tasks and there were both girls and boys pictured, but for those specific 3 that we need in the morning it happened to be boys (lucky me). Nevertheless, I profusely apologised and said she was right and I would try and swap them over with some girls ones for the next day.

There was also a fiery debate about who got the first turn to turn the visual around after completing one step (doing one each wasn’t good enough). I suggested the first person to achieve said first step, but this suggestion wasn’t welcome.

He then was adamant to include a visual with TV time in the sequence of events. There was also a heated argument about this but ultimately his petition was politely declined.

Once we survived the “checklist” we proceeded to get the sticker for the chart (couldn't start with a fail the first day). She chose a long sticker that covered 3 columns and demanded the treat was given "NOW". He put the sticker in the middle of the sheet rather than on the first box and also grabbed a pencil to scribble all over the rest of the page.

I then made the silly mistake to ask her to come get her hair done and she pointed out that that wasn’t on the checklist and threw herself on the floor asking “why do we have to fix [her] hair every day?”.