The girls have been wreched the last couple times we went to Walmart. So I reviewed with them four rules that they must follow at the store and made them memorize them.
1. Stay with me at all times.
2. No touching anything.
3. No crying about not getting anything.
4. Keep hands on the cart in the parking lot.
These are rules not only for my own sanity, but also for safety. These are rules that I've been training them to follow since they were old enough to walk and that I consider their responsibility to follow and not mine to enforce. These are rules that are not followed with anything approaching perfection. But I was happy with the previous level of imperfection as compared to the current level of imperfection. When I have a five year old standing in the checkout crying about not getting a candy bar (really!), I really have to wonder what in the world she is thinking.
So we've summed up all expected shopping behaviors into four rules which Imogen really digs. I asked her the rules yesterday on the way to the store yesterday. She rattled them off with passable accuracy then said she would write them in her head. She pretended to write on the top of her head.
"I have lots of lists in my head. I have lots of paper in my head so I can write down my lists," she explains to me. Genevieve immediately repeats this. Imogen goes on to prattle happily about all the rules she must write down and remember. Genevieve gets confused and asks if Imogen will teach her the game to which all these rules belong. To Genevieve, rules are for games. To Imogen, rules are for EVERYTHING.
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