I Love M&M's!

I absolutely love M&M's. Not for their delectable chocolaty goodness and not for how they quiet rambuncious kids....
I love M&M's because they clean my house! Yep! They clean my house.
Through this wonderful confection from the Marz Company, I am able to inspire my otherwise unwilling children to pick up the endless supply of "stuff" that seems to loom over the entire house. Of course, they don't seem to notice it when I ask them to pick up after themselves. They'll go into a room and pick up a token piece of paper here and there, or throw a pair of shoes towards the shoe basket (mind you, it rarely actually makes it into the basket), and call the job complete.
I ask them to take a second look---but they just don't see any of the stuff lying around that is driving my crazy.

Ah, but when I give the incentive of M&M's--I prefer to call it incentive (motivation could work too), and not bribery. Bribery give the illusion that I'm a weak wimpy mom....maybe I am, but I now have a clean picked up home!

I'm happy, they are happy -- I can tell my quest of obtaining a food storage is rubbing off on them, they are collecting their m&m....to be eaten at a later time.

AND, I now am satisfied that their eyes work just fine and we can stave off the visit to the optometrist!

How it works--We bargained that 7 items picked up and put away will earn 1 m&m.

We did this about 4-6 months ago, and it worked beautifully...but it became expensive to maintain this with our messy house--that was at a 1 to 1 ratio. Maybe I should buy stock in chocolate companies, because I really, really, really, like having a clean, picked up house (and the 7 to 1 ratio seems to be working well for now.)