i do all my own blogs: green light day

hayden's class has a "light" chart for their behavior. at the beginning of the day they all start on green. they then get a warning and then the lights begin to change. yellow, double yellow, then red. the day before school started, during the class orientation, the teacher let us know that on a red light day, the students would have a note sent home regarding what they did. she then followed it up with a "but there really aren't very many of those." i laughed inside and thought....oh this year is going to change her life.
hayden has had a pretty difficult time getting green lights. but the red light days have come quite easy to him. awhile ago we made a policy at home. if he got a green light he would get a quarter. if he got a green light all week he would get a total of $2.00 for the week. dave would also give him a "squish, zerbert, tickle" which seemed to work even more then the quarter. if he got a yellow light, nothing would happen to him but he wouldn't get the quarter. a double yellow meant he had to take a short nap/rest and would lose video games. and a red light day meant he had to take a longer nap/rest and would lose video games, shows and movies. at one point we had so many red days we then took away desserts and treats for the day.
last week jessica and justin were in town. that thursday jessica texted me and said that if i wanted to bribe him, i could tell hayden that if he got a green light jessica would take him swimming at a friends house. i didn't mention the swimming part because i knew i wasn't going to go swimming and i just didn't know what would happen so i left it as "we'll do something super fun if you get a green light."
jessica and justin came over a bit before hayden got home from school. i figured he wouldn't be coming home with a green light since bribes usually don't work with him and, let's face it, i'm just a glass half empty kind of person.
a little after 12 he comes jumping off of the bus and informs us he did, in fact, get a green light that day. we all had decided we didn't want to go swimming so we had to come up with something to do. i thought about putt putt or ice cream and then thought....why not chuck e. cheese. we've never taken hayden and he's always talked about it from commercials.
so we all packed up and headed to chuck e. cheese for lunch and video games. the whole ride there, hayden was telling me about how cool this place is and how parents can "relax." more commercial talk.
the boys both loved it. talan fell in love with a little car ride where he sat next to chuck e. cheese and it would snap his picture. i put him on a barney ride that was more or less exactly like it, but he jumped off before the ride was even over and asked for the mouse ride again.
we ate pizza, watched the chuck e. cheese stage show...which both of the boys LOVED, played video games, rode roller coaster rides and ended the day with some cotton candy.
we talked all about how when you are good, you get to do fun things. after the long weekend, he went back to school and got a yellow yesterday. not too bad, i guess.
only 2 more weeks so we'll try to get as many green lights as possible so he can go and buy something with all of his quarters.

riding a roller coaster: