Christmas Ultimatum

Although I started wrapping our presents a few weeks ago, I haven't put any under the tree. I have been afraid that they would attract too much attention and quickly be unwrapped. Hence, they have been brightening the top of my closet and dresser for the last little while. The kids have started to notice that all of their friends have presents under their trees and have started asking when we get to put our presents under the tree. A couple of days ago, I came up with an idea. In the past, we have had our presents under our upstairs tree in our front room, but this year I decided we would use the downstairs tree. There are a couple of reasons for this; 1st, KL is down there less and it would therefore escape her attention longer. 2nd, I figured that most of the presents are for the kids and as soon as we finish opening them, Dave and I spend at least an hour or so telling them kids to take their things downstairs and put them away. Opening them downstairs is an effort to help that process. And finally, why not? Anyway, back to our empty tree and my brilliant idea. Wednesday when the kids came home from school, I told them that as soon as they had the basement clean (I told them this included my idea of clean, not theirs and it was for their rooms, bathroom, and family room), they could put the presents under the tree. I expected this to incite an amount of excitement and a cleaning frenzy to ensue. Well, no such luck. I kept trying to get them excited, but L went outside to play, D went down to play wii and B was here, there and everywhere. Finally, I got B to focus a little bit and told him to go down and clean his room. After about 15 minutes, I could tell he wasn't cleaning but had joined D. I yelled down, "Don't you want any presents?" He answered, "No. We like Wii better."

I gave up for the rest of the afternoon, but yesterday when D woke up, he was all gung ho and sure enough he had everything down before school. Yea! So, I'm happy to say, we now have presents under our tree.



Now to keep it clean... I told them today that if they let their room get messy, or if they don't put something away or do what they are told, I get to take one of their presents back! Hee hee hee!