My kids' stuff is taking over the house! After this weekend and a week full of playmates it was just more than I could handle. For some reason (probably my fault), my kids just have a very hard time understanding the concept of putting something away after you are done playing with it. So tonight at Family Home Evening, we touched on Elder Ballard's talk from General Conference - even children need to help their parents. They can pick up their toys, make their bed if their old enough, etc. And then...we introduced the concept of the "GUNNY MAN". This is the song I remember from my childhood:
"Here comes Gunny Man,
Yum, Yum, Yummy,
He eats up all the toys,
And keeps them in his tummy"
We let the kids know that the Gunny Man would now be visiting our house at night and if their things were left out - they would disappear! Pretty tough - I know (my parents did it w/us for awhile). Anyway, Max and Kenna cleaned up pretty quickly tonight. We are also introducing new responsibility/reward charts (thanks Kim for the template). I'm hoping that this will help solve our cleanup problems. It has to - right? No clean up = no more toys. Can I be that tough?
6 comments:
Let me know if it works...I'll have to try it. I can be that tough!
I love the Gunny Man song! That was the best one on that tape. Good luck!
i totally stole this from you after i read it and told Bode all about the gunny man. He tried to argue with me that the "gummy" man couldn't eat such things, but PROMPTLY picked up all the legos and did it again today without being asked! HA! LOVE IT!!
What a great idea! I am going to keep that one in mind when Kyler gets older!! I think you can be that tough! It's already working, so just stick with it:) Thanks for the info!!
This 'tradition'was handed over to us from Jeff's family...but I guess it became a little distorted. 'Gunny Bags' does the same thing, but when we introduced him to Hadley and her cousin they were terrified. She and her cousin were too scared to go to sleep the first night, but they sure cleaned up their toys!! :)
Hi mimi this is melissa jeff b little sister.. I just stocked your blog from jeff's. We use to do this and it was great. I never worked out a system to give the toys back so they just sat up in the attic for over a year. And the next year I regifted my own kids and they had no idea. It was hilarious. Well you have inspired me to try it again. So you just make them do a job to earn back the toy??? I enjoyed your blog.
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