It’s a beautiful thing..

Yes, that’s right….the egg timer is a beautiful thing.

Here at the Richardson household, we have been struggling with focusing on the task at hand (getting dressed, brushing teeth, eating lunch under an hour, etc…..).

So, we bought an egg timer. Very small investment for such a huge payoff. You might be thinking, why don’t you just use the timer on the microwave, oven, or your cell phone? Well, that is where the beauty of the egg timer comes in. All of those other tools for timing have nothing on the visual impact and sound the egg timer produces. For some reason, you set that thing right in front of your kid and they see the minutes shrinking and they hear the tick, tick, tick, and it gets them in gear.

Today, we used it at lunch time. Emma started off good eating her lunch, and then she went and got Froggy (some of you know whom I speak of). Well, the dawdling began. Chatting with Froggy, not really eating. I told Emma that if she focused and finished her lunch like a good girl, she would get a yummy pudding for a treat. That still didn’t do the trick. I then took the pudding out of the fridge and set it right in front of her, hoping to entice her to speed it up. Nope, still chatting with Froggy and getting squirrelly in her seat. Time for the big guns, the egg timer. I set that thing for 5 minutes, put in right in front of her and told her no pudding if her plate still has food on it when the egg timer dings. She was done in less than 2 minutes…..NICE!

Check out Emma enjoying her hard earned pudding!