Kids will believe anything once.

I know, because the other day we told the kids we were going to have a really fun, cool, relaxing day tidying the house. There were a few groans from the older ones, because they’re old enough to know that tidying is work and asking an 8-year-old to lift his finger on the weekend (besides the one that’s taking pictures on his camera) is like asking an elephant to lose a little weight. It’s a death sentence. Or so they think.

But Husband and I had already decided we were going to make this a game. What kid doesn’t like a game? We called it the “Reset Game,” because smart parents don’t include “tidy” or “clean up” anywhere in the title of a game, and we’re nothing if not smart parents. We started playing the Reset Game at 8 a.m., because my kids like to wake up at 6 a.m. on the weekends and burst through our door to tell us they’re starving to death. First we explained the rules: Every time they finished “resetting” in one category—say, clearing all the blankets from the floor—they got to ring a bell and draw a reward from a hat.

Rewards were things like ten minutes of jumping on the trampoline or reading for five minutes or choosing a treat from the list of approved ones or an extra story at their story time of choice.

We started out well. The 8-year-old was tasked with carrying all the dining room table chairs from the living room to their proper place, because the boys had used them to build a fort last night and hadn’t put them back, since their “legs were tired” and they couldn’t walk anymore and especially couldn’t drag chairs to their proper place. The 6-year-old took all the blankets they’d brought outside because it was 89 degrees instead of 107 and put them back on their beds. The 5-year-old worked on the 20 billion Battleship pieces spread out on the floor like a whole battalion of white pegs had exploded in our living room. The 3-year-old twins were picking up all the dirty clothes boys had left lying around in their rush to go “jump on the trampoline in their underwear” (which is not allowed, by the way. We’re just not always paying close attention, because trying to tame wild animals is exhausting.).

The 8-year-old was the first one finished. He rang the bell, and Husband congratulated him and held out the top hat, where all the rewards were folded up into tiny squares.

“A treat!” he said, his eyes wide and excited, as if he hadn’t just inhaled a stack of twelve pancakes drowned in honey. We let him have a bag of Annie’s fruit snacks. He crammed them down and was quick to ask what his next task was.

The 5-year-old finished next, which is impressive, considering the piece-count, but he’s a pretty exceptional child who has never, ever given up when it comes to a seemingly impossible task. He rang the bell and drew his prize.

“Five minutes on the trampoline!” he said. We sent him out the door. Then the twins and the 6-year-old finished at the same time, and there was a traffic jam at the bell, because the bell stopped working when one of the twins touched it, confirming our diagnosis of those two as The Destroyers (think the opposite of King Midas. You know how everything turned to gold when King Midas touched it? Everything breaks when the twins touch it. They don’t even have to touch it. They only have to look at it.). They all drew their papers, but the twins can’t read, so even though I was in the middle of doing the dishes, I had to wipe my hands on my pajama pants and read it for them.

“Treats!” I said. “Everybody got treats.” I looked at Husband. He looked at me. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. What if they drew “treat” more than once? How could we take the “treat” squares out if the 5-year-old hadn’t yet drawn it? Could we blame the luck of the draw? Did we have to play fair? I had already manipulated the numbers, putting one paper with “treat” on it and thirty-six papers with something else on it, because treat was the most dangerous of them all.

The 8-year-old finished his next task and drew a paper. I didn’t even have to guess what his paper said because of the look in his eyes.

“Another treat!” he said.

“Maybe just one now,” I said. Tidying the house wasn’t worth walls coming down from the boys bouncing off them. I opened up the package of fruit snacks and handed only one out to every boy who drew the treat card. Which was every single one of them every single time. I have no idea how they beat the odds. There were six of each of the six different rewards, and they kept drawing the ONE treat paper I’d put in there. I think one of them must have put an invisible magnet on the back of it so every time they reached in, it jumped into their hand.

We went through five packages of fruit snacks. I knew we’d pay for it later.

A couple of them got to jump on the trampoline, and then the “extra bedtime story” started coming around, after I took the “treat” paper out and stuck it in the bottom of the trash can, so we had five extra bedtime stories that night.

By dinnertime, the boys were bouncy balls, laughing about some kind of game that looked like human bumper cars, except without the seat belts, and we had to pull out the megaphone just to get our voices heard above the roar of hilarity. “Time for dinner!” we said.

“We’re not hungry!” they said. Of course they weren’t. They ate their weight in fruit snacks.

But our house looked fantastic.

We sat them down anyway, and it was like eating on a rocket ship. The whole table trembled with their shaking legs and arms and faces. Husband and I looked at each other with the same look on our faces.

Never again, we said.

They wouldn’t go to bed. I wished for the thousandth time that there was such thing as a tranquilizer gun that would send my boys to sleep the exact moment we said, “Okay, time for lights out.” The last one didn’t fall asleep until 12:30 a.m. He says he stayed up all night, but I went in to check on them later, and they were all mouth breathing, their bodies twisted like circus freaks, as if they’d just dropped in the middle of an act—which they probably had.

The next time we tried the “Reset Game,” the boys were less impressed. They had, after all, figured out the point of the game and weren’t quite so thrilled to tidy. It was boring. Hard work. Plus, the treats we were offering this time were grapes. Who would work for grapes? I wouldn’t even do that.

At least I’m raising smart kids.

This is an excerpt from The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children, the second book in the Crash Test Parents series.To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.