I want to say that parenting brings out my creative side because I’m one of those awesome parents that lets their kids paint at home… nope that is why my kids go to preschool (thank you awesome teachers!).

Discipline brings out my creative side.

Traditional punishments don’t work at our house, threats of punishment don’t work either, my kids just don’t care.

So we have to improvise.

I come from a family of great disciplinarians.

My dad was the king of “stand in the corner”. I hated that punishment. Basically you stood in the corner of the kitchen while the family ate, it was boring, not damaging in any way, just so incredibly boring.

My mom would punish us by taking away part of something we liked- sure you can ride your bike… but the front tire is mine, yep you can play video games… but I’ve taken the power cord. Classics.

I am not as creative, though occasionally I have a stroke of genius.

Here’s my latest “brainwave”.

My boys love “potty talk”, why I don’t know, how fun is it to scream FART and POOP over and over, or randomly insert these words into sentences? Apparently it’s loads of fun.

I am tired of potty talk, it is so irritating.

The other night they were going full steam ahead at dinner when it came to me, if you use potty talk then you get to clean the toilet.

It was genius.

The toilets at our house are SUPER clean now, probably the cleanest they have ever been.

And guess what…. the number of potty words has decreased significantly, it turns out they don’t like cleaning toilets any more than I do.

Genius.