Discipline ideas?

I'm putting out a general call for creative discipline ideas! Right now I don't want to read any books so I'm taking the shortcut route and asking you instead.

I feel that the negative consequences we're giving Chickie right now are hit or miss in terms of their effectiveness. We do mostly time outs, grounding (longer than a time out), and loss of TV/computer privileges.

We don't spank and right now that's not something I want to add to our discipline plan.

Chickie's a "tester;" she likes to see what she can get away with. She's not the most compliant kid, which can make things challenging for me (since I was very compliant as a child.) But I love her independence and creativity; I just want to channel it in the right direction.

Thanks in advance!

Mmm...reindeer...

We were listening to "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" yesterday, and it got to the part about "eight tiny reindeer."

Chickie immediately wanted to know why Santa "ate tiny reindeer."

Tale of a tree

We've been thinking of getting a new Christmas tree...one that's pre-lit and taller than our old one. We found one we loved at Sears on the day after Thanksgiving. It looked so realistic, with the high-quality branches and the brown trunk peeking through.



But we weren't sure if we wanted to spend the money. It cost more than we'd expected, even being on sale. At home I checked online and realized the price was quite good; nice artificial nine-foot trees can be very pricey.

Later we went to a store that was having a big Christmas tree sale, and we didn't find anything we liked as much as the first one we'd seen--nothing even came close. Chickie, however, found the one she wanted to buy.



Thankfully The Engineer and I have veto power, so we left that store without a tree.

We continued to discuss our options, and finally decided we really wanted the tree, and that the price was justified, considering how many years we plan to use it. So yesterday The Engineer picked it up and assembled it.

At an early stage of the assembly, Chickie protested, "That doesn't look like a Christmas tree!"



Thankfully, once it was all put together, with the branches spread out and the lights plugged in, it looked very much like a Christmas tree, and we liked it just as much as we had in the store.



This morning, I dragged out the ornaments, and this was the first year both kids were actually pretty helpful.



The tree is beautiful. Our theme is "Toddler/Preschool Chic." This popular tree decorating theme involves plastic, wooden, and cloth ornaments on the bottom half of the tree; with breakable ornaments on the top half.



Happy December first...and Merry Christmas!