My daughter loves to play outside.  It is not uncommon for her to take her shoes off, especially if she’s playing in the sand box.

Scenario

A while ago, I let the kids play outside in the back yard as I was cooking dinner.  (Luckily, our kitchen has windows to the backyard, so I can keep an eye on them and get stuff done in the kitchen.)

As I was getting close to being done, I told the kids that they had five more minutes to play before they had to pick up.  For some reason, they decided to go ahead, pick up and come inside.

Usually, I will go outside and make sure everything is put away properly, I don’t know if I forgot to do it, if I had my husband or oldest do it, or if I did and just didn’t do a very good job.  However, I didn’t notice that something was missing.

Missing

Once again, we were missing a pair of shoes.  (Does this only happen in my house?  We are constantly loosing shoes!  We even have a shoe basket, but it never fails, we are always on the lookout for someone’s shoes.  And, boy, have I found shoes in some weird places!)

We could not find my daughters sandals for quite a few days.

Finally, when my husband went out to mow the lawn, low and behold, he found the sandals.  Our little princess had left them outside and the dog have chewed them up to (almost) shreds!  (I wish I would have taken a picture of the chewed up shoes).

Consequence

She needed a new pair of sandals, since hers were destroyed.  So,  we had her “work” to pay for some new ones.  (I had found some cute flip-flops that were on clearance and I had a coupon, they were actually free to me, but we wanted to use this as a “teachable” moment.)

We told her that she had to earn $2 to pay for some new shoes.  She had to do extra chores and we would pay her 50 cents for each chore.  So over the next few days, she was busy:

wiping down the cabinets in the bathrooms and kitchen

helping me with extra things

and wiping down a few places on the walls

Lesson Learned

(we hope!)  🙂

Even though it’s been over two months since this happened, she will still sometimes talk about it.  When she goes outside, she tells me that she will make sure to leave her shoes on.  And when she puts on the flip-flops, she talks about paying for them by doing “all that hard work!”