Kid Update - Sari

Sari has been playing the violin with the orchestra this year in school.  She has really been enjoying it.  This was her first performance and she and Amelia did a duet for it.  At the end of January we went to New Beginnings for our ward Young Women's Program.  The Laurels kidnapped the incoming Beehives and we all met at the church for breakfast.  I can't believe she'll be 12 this year.  She is very into being with friends as often as possible but is also very responsible and helpful at home.  She has her first babysitting job outside of family next week, so that's exciting.  I made the mistake of giving in to letting her and Kate have a few sleepovers with friends.  They came home really irritable and were very hard to live with afterward.  Scott and I decided we're back to NO sleepovers.  We let the girls have a bunch of friends over last Friday night for a late night.  At the end of the night when it was time to take the friends home Sari and Kate started asking for them to sleepover.  When I told them no, they completely flipped out.  It was crazy.  So they both were grounded for a week.  Whenever they get grounded they usually have the option of extra work around home to reduce the amount of time they are grounded.  They opted to chip away at the work I laid out for them.  They are quite capable of lots of good work!  They vacuumed the house including the stairs, cleaned the VERY messy garage, cleaned the bathrooms, dusted the house, washed a couple walls, wrote a page paper about why their behavior was unacceptable, organized all our paints and play-dough toys and threw away all the old hard stuff and washed the top of the refrigerator.  They were able to finish all that work in three days and were un-grounded by Tuesday after they finished their last job.