Marble Jar

About a month ago, Handley was having a hard time going to bed at night because of her recent fear of the dark and burglars and she was also becoming quite whiney at times during the day.  To combat these two problems I decided to implement a new reward system for her.  She had a jar in her room and every night she stayed in her room and went right to sleep she got to put a marble in the jar the next morning.  During the day if she wasn't whiney or if she was especially helpful I'd let her add a marble to the jar.  It worked like a charm and I could see her thinking about the way she would react when things weren't quite going her way so that she could earn more marbles.  The deal was, when she filled up her marble jar she could pick a prize or a special outing.

For several weeks now she has been filling up her jar and telling me that for her prize she wanted to go to Stevie B's.  For those of you not familiar with Stevie B's, it is a pizza buffet restaurant, complete with Handley's favorite, marshmallow dessert pizza. However, the main attraction of Stevie B's isn't the food...it's the games.  They have a small room filled with Chuckie Cheese type games where you can earn tickets to redeem for prizes.

This week she finally filled her jar and was beside herself with excitement.  Because my parents are in town for Harper's party, they got to join us there for lunch today.

After eating lunch it was time to play games!  Handley was really happy that Robby was able to meet us for her special lunch too and helped her earn extra tickets.

After playing lots of games and earning lots of tickets it was time to feed our tickets into the ticket counting machine.  Seeing our large stack of tickets sparked Handley to tell me, "I going to be able to pick an expensive prize."  Ha!  She was right though because our grand total was 396 tickets!

Handley picked out a Cinderella Pez dispenser, a bouncy ball, and a plastic frog.  Harper was happy with her jewel ring. The entire ride home Handley kept saying, "I can't believe the lady let me pick out all these prizes!"  I guess before today, the few times we've been to Stevie B's she only got to pick a dinky little prize so to her, she had hit the jack-pot today.  She certainly deserved it though because she has been SO good and working SO hard.  Today we dumped the jar and will start the process all over again!