It totally worked!

On Friday I was at Mary Ann's house for Cole's piano lesson and there was a Parent's magazine there and on the cover was..."The best discipline trick ever" (or something like that). I immediately turn to that article and there's a picture of a child with post it notes all over them with different praising phrases on them. After a quick glance it's basically saying to give praise to a child, give HUGE kudos for doing the good and not so much for the bad. I was like I've heard this before. I read on a little bit then I needed to lend my attention to my kids destroying Mary Ann's house :). So I thought about it as we drove around that morning and knew that I do say more often, "Laura, stop that" "Cole, don't do that", "Hannah, no!". So I decided to give put a whole hearted effort into this. After I put Hannah down for her nap the kids had started watching a movie and they had left their shoes out. I twice asked Laura to put her shoes in the cubby and got nothing. Typically I would repeat myself say pause the movie or some other negative reinforcement. Instead I saw that Cole got his shoes, cause he knew the movie would be paused otherwise and I said "Cole, thank you so much for putting away your shoes, give me five". He was so proud of himself and then....I waited, biting my tongue and within two minutes Laura averted her attention from the movie and said, "mom, was their something you wanted me to do? What was it?" She got her shoes and came to get her high fives.

I used this extra cheesy (to me) praise (I believe in saying thank you or good job, but not so laviciously as this article suggested or that I was doing) and it worked up until bedtime then they were just giddy and tired and not much would've worked. I wasn't with them yesterday and there didn't seem to be as much of an opportunity today for some reason, so we'll start again tomorrow and see what happens. I could tell that variety will be key, too many high fives and they'll be done with that, but the shoes are up.

If you have lifelong experiences with this I'd love to hear about them...or one week experiences :)