Stickers are Gold

A few days into Buttercups placement, we started using a weekly sticker chart. It's seriously been worth its weight in gold. I didn't think I'd ever use one in my house to give stickers for behaviors/things that are normal to do like eating breakfast, completing tasks on your own, or making good choices, but these are odd circumstances and Buttercup already knows exactly how it works from her time in Shelter.

I had a lot of fun setting up our chart and outlining the goals we were aiming for. Currently, we are looking for nice words and listening ears. through this, and other behavior modification techniques, the phrases "I hate ____" and "____is ugly" have been replaced with "I don't want that right now" and " I don't like that today". Note: "I hate chocolate" and " I hate cheese" have been spoken in our home. I KNOW that's not true since those are some of my main tools of bribery!

This system has acted as a way to gain Buttercups trust, she is active in the decision if she gets a sticker or not by trying to remember if she walked to school, or roman carried her etc. On Saturdays, we go to the dollar store and she can pick whatever prizes she wants based on the number of stickers. Its ALWAYS exciting!



Buttercup is really good at making decisions. I went to the dollar store thinking that it was going to end horribly with both of us leaving angry. She has gotten to pick three things the last few weeks, so we carry a basket and when she picks out four things, I say "uh oh, we have four things, which one are you going to put back" she looks and thinks,  you can see the wheels turning and then politely puts one thing back (almost where we found it!). Some decisions are quick, others take a lot of time but its fun to watch her figure it out.



This week we changed some of the goals on the sticker chart- which she found exciting since stickers were SOOO easy to earn before. we will see how this continues.