By Tracee Sioux

For practical purposes I must amend my previous post about the sin beauty bank.

The first practical problem being that my daughter is fixating on going out for Chinese. She loves going to Chinese as a great way for us to hang out.

"Mama, can we just call ourselves a bunch of names so we can put a bunch of quarters in the box and go to Chinese today?"

Obviously, I underestimated her cognitive ability to connect saying bad things about ourselves with being rewarded with Chinese food. I think we shall have to go to Chinese first and talk about why it's wrong to say bad things about our selves and our bodies. That both gets the point of what I'm trying to change across and take away the incentive to reward bad behavior.

I have yet to decide what we should then do with our quarters when the box is full. My husband thinks that he should be allowed to take the money and go to Chinese without us. But, I don't think that's a great idea either.

The other practical problem was presented when I told her to put a quarter in the box and she informed me, "I don't have any quarters," and went directly to my purse to get some.

I jumped on this opportunity to get the dusting done. I handed her a duster and told her she would have to earn quarters to put in the bank and told her I'd give her a couple of quarters if she dusted the whole house to my satisfaction.

Another issue I can see cropping up is that I have already used my power of making her pay for bad behavior by making her put a quarter in the bank for constantly and incessantly complaining. So far this is the only quarter she has had to deposit. Is this an abuse of my newly discovered power?

I, on the other hand, have had to deposit a quarter for saying, "I am so stupid" when I pulled out a sweat shirt I really liked and realized I had gotten pink paint on it. I then had to write, "I am smart. It is OK to make mistakes," on a post-it and plop it on the bank.

We're 50 cents into it. I'll keep you posted.