To Reward or Not Reward, and some weddings and mountains

In the midst of developing a rather involved summer reward/chore chart system, I ran across articles comparing rewards to dangling carrots. "You're raising a child not training a puppy," they say and they tell me the only way to really teach correct behavior is to do it through love and logic type learning. But then there's the school of thought that says reward good behavior to encourage good habits. So I'm revamping the reward system and trying to think about whether or not my "carrots" are helping them want to be good intrinsically, or relying solely on extrinsic motivation.


What are your plans for summer with kids home? How are you preparing for all that free time? I think I'm going to end up with some basic chore requirements not directly linked to fun stuff, but required to be completed to participate in fun stuff....and maybe some extra chores that they can earn money for or something like that.

While you're pondering your response, I'll entertain you with pictures from my recent trip to UT and AZ. Our "Spring Wedding Tour," as we (I) called it, included Chris' step-sister Tedi's wedding at the Salt Lake Temple and my cousin Whitney's wedding in the Mesa, AZ temple. We saw almost everyone we're both related to and got to squeeze in some wonderful family time in between events. It really made the top 3 for family trips we've done ever. We planned it with about 3 days notice and I think that worked well for us.

We spent some time as a family on the Salt Lake Temple grounds, where we were married. The kids had only seen it in pictures. They loved the vast conference center and the pictures in the visitor's center. The flowers reminded me of our spring wedding! Our poor CA kids could hardly handle the less-than-60 degree weather (it was actually more like 40 and rainy and windy!). We had our winter coats (hoodies) but I guess they have different winter gear in UT!

Ben and Grandpa Barney at Erica's house celebrating Chris' birthday.

Here's the Barney family at Tedi's wedding.

On our way from UT to AZ we drove through Zion's National Park. Holy gorgeousness!

The kids trooped up a mile long trail to a beautiful vantage point.

The kids (if you couldn't tell by now) are in this "pose for the camera" phase which means different things for Lucy than for Sam and Ben.

THE TOP!

I just realized I have no pics of Whitney's wedding. We went from 45 and freezing our pathetic California tails off in UT to 100 and sweltering in AZ and I think that just sucked all of the rest of what energy we had left out of us. Basically it was swimming, swimming, eating, wedding, swimming. So pretty much as good as it gets.