I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or cry when I saw the enormous crate of bananas on our front porch. 

This was not an April Fool’s Day joke. 

Let me back up…. 

Having 6 kids means we go through A LOT of food. I despise putting away the Costco size food packages, but we need the volume so it becomes a necessary evil. 

Going to Costco ranks up there with the DMV so I always order through instacart. 

In my ordering haste, I hit “add to cart” on the bananas as if I was shopping our local store through instacart. My usual order of  10 bananas did not equal 10 individual bananas, it meant 10 BUNCHES of nine bananas or NINETY BANANAS. 

Yep, I opened the door to find 90 freaking bananas staring me in the face. Maybe the delivery guy thought we had a monkey? Maybe a beach banana party? Maybe a banana bread making business? Either way, I was stuck with my banana crate. 

My kids really thought this was hilarious and one of...

My son looked at me with his striking hazel eyes after I offered him the option of a cookie or ice cream and he replied, “how about I have the cookie and the ice cream”. 

An hour earlier I gave the kids the option to leave the pool in ten minutes or twenty minutes and my older kids said “how about we stay here and walk home when we’re ready?”

Leave it to kids to remind you of the important life lessons that maybe there’s a third, viable option you haven’t considered. 

Like every parent out there, I’ve considered and used bribery, yelling, technology, threats and coercion, but lately I’ve been going back to good ol’ Love and Logic. One of the Love and Logic teachings is that the parent gives the child two options to choose from and the child gets to make the decision. The trick strategy is that the parent gives two options knowing that they’re ok with either option the child chooses. The child feels good...