Death By Chocolate

Okay, I have to ask... are there any other mommies out their who bribe their children with sweets? I have to admit that today, I did just that. I was feeling a wee bit more enthusiastic about getting some schoolwork done than my plead-her-case daughter was. There was also an enormous amount of Easter candy just sitting there on the counter (I could see the eyes of the Peeps staring at me from across the room saying , "Eat me, eat me before I get stale"). My children were also begging for candy from the moment they woke up. It was the perfect storm: three fronts (or pressures) colliding at once. The pressure was too intense for even ME, the nutritionist (or "purist" as my mother-in-law has referred to me as, in regards to me NOT putting sugar on top of my kids cereal) to resist. So, I gave in.
I promised a treat to Sophia and Nicolas for finishing her "Rhyming Phrases and Words" book and her reading game that I made up (I places those foam blocks with words on each surface along in a path and had her read words off of them as she jumped from block to block. She is somewhat of a kinesthetic learner AND was quite excited at the prospect of sugar at 10am so she moved pretty quickly at this point). Poor Nicolas... an innocent bystander at the mercy of his sister (once again). He couldn't get any candy until she was done either (wow, that's pretty unfair of me...).
So here was the reward. Of course I had to make it even across the boards so I had to set an amount to choose from for each kind of candy. My equation went something like this:
4 small jellybeans=2 large jelly beans=1peep=1/2 Cadbury egg=2 malted Robin's Egg chocolates
It's quite complicated and I was quite pleased to get to use some of my algebra on this mommy moment.
Oh, there was a bright spot in all of this. My children are quite fond of hard-boiled eggs, especially if they are brightly colored. So, they did have some nutrition in the midst of all of this sugar and food dye. They each chose 2 eggs. I have to relinquish my OCD about keeping a clean house every time I let them crack, peel and eat those darn crumbly eggs by themselves (but it's a good skill for them to have, right???). They started to peel the eggs and this darling conversation followed:

Sophia: crack, crack, crack. peel, peel, peel. "We are the doulas right now."
Nicolas: "Yeah."
Mom: "Oh, tell me why sweetie?"
Sophia: "Oh, because we are helping the baby chicks to come out of their shells."

Adorable. We then had a little discussion about the "daddy" chickens and the "mommy" chickens and Sophia seemed to know that the dads had to do something to the eggs for them to become chickens in the first place!
So needless to say, after a day of jellybeans and peeps I actually gave them a piece of their chocolates as they "wound down" for bed. "But just a piece" I said. So Sophia chose the "legs" off of her chocolate ballerina (she already decided that tomorrow she'll have the tutus and the body the day after that!) and Nicolas chose the "dirt" from the back of his chocolate dump truck. What a sick night!