Calm Down Bottle and Sweat Stains

We are not spanking parents.  I don't like it. I have swatted my kids at times, mostly for trying to do something extremely dangerous,  or because I felt the pressure that this was the only thing that would make my kids listen.  Well, its not my go-to, and I do believe there are better ways. So I think through the struggling to decide which ways of punishing or consequinces was going to work, we lost Aidan's trust.  I really hate to admit that. He gets upset and he doesn't have the skills to calm himself down.

I found a website I really love to reference for ideas in avoiding power struggles. You can find a link here. The site is called Aha Parenting and I absolutely love it. If you feel like you just can't get to where you want to be and you need some fresh ideas, I highly recommend taking a peek. Anyway, I. lso follow them on Facebook and Pinterest, and it was there we found the calm down bottle. I showed Aidan and even he thought it sounded like a good idea. There are many different versions to this so you can do a search on pinterest and see which one sounds good to you. 

We decided to use a water bottle, glitter glue, and regular glitter. I thought about using those tiny toys for the I-spy idea, but I didn't want to bput extra money into it, although we might make extra bottles later.  Aidan helped and decided hev wanted to use all the colors. So it basically reminds me of New Years Eve when the countdown hits one and people are setting of their party things that explode (I don't know what they are called.) We used hot water to melt the glitter glue, and we used three tubes. Then added 6-half tubes of glitter. Then I added hot glue from a glue gun to the cap and sealed it, and shook it for about 2 minutes.  And then we were set. I do have some pictures I would like to post but I haven't figured that out yet. Edit to come hopefully!

Next job for the day,  working on the hubby's work shirts!

Maybe I'm figuring this out a little. The picture is a little out of place but if it works right? Well. Onto the shirt explanation.  I read an article where the lady used a one part dawn dishsoap, two parts hydrogen peroxide, and sprinkle of baking soda mixture, and scrubbed it into the sweat stains with great success. She even used it on a color shirt and had no bleaching.  I have three shirts that needed a good treatment.  One shirt being white, had great results.  The next shirt is orange, not as much. Unfortunately, there was alittle bleaching, so I cannot recommend this for anything other then white. However, I do know Dawn is amazing for cutting grease so for the last shirt, which is a dark, navy blue, I will be first trying just soap. If that doesn't work, i might try some baking soda paste. Will update