been a while blog world! don't know why i blog cause since i am so inconsistent, no one checks it anymore. that's ok. i am throwing this out there anyway....
as i have gone thru my married life, more specifically, my married with children life, i always have a little bit of guilt cause of the finger prints on the walls, the dirty floor that was clean a few minutes ago, the not so perfect house that others seem to maintain so easily. my dear husband, my wonderful step mom, and one of my good friends often tell me that i am not hard enough on my kids and that i don't expect enough.
in february, i got so sick that i couldn't get out of bed. i didn't care what my house looked like, thank goodness for troy who does care about both me and the house, cause he took over and as always, rocks it way better than i ever have, adding of course, to the guilt i already had. no biggy. i didn't care and i am used to it.
well as i was able to find how to make myself better, and started taking the medicine, i started to slowly come out of the non caring attitude. keep in mind, the non caring has only been since february, the guilt has been since forever. anywho, i slowly was able to see that for my entire married with children life, i expect myself to do everything. why is that? i have my guesses, but i don't really care about that either. so i started to assign my kids chores--i have always assigned them a dish day and daily room cleaning (which for some reason they rarely followed thru with), but now i am expecting that they do the bulk of the housework. slaves? they at first thought so...until i asked them if they ever saw me making any of this mess. for instance, muddy shoes or hands, was it me that walked on the carpet or ran my hands over the door. no.
so the very first thing i did was to take away the daily dish chore (assigning each kid a day of the week for dishes) because inevitably, some were always left over for the next person the next day. so now everyone does the dishes every meal. it started out really good, then stopped working, then i almost gave up and went back to the old way, but i told them that as long as it took them to figure out how to work together, then that was how long it was going to take to do the dishes. there have been some instances that i have had to shut my office door for 3 hours while they got it done.
i also stopped nagging and started following thru with good and bad consequences. the natural ones are sometimes the hardest. but that too has gotten lots easier.
so yesterday we all had a pow-wow and i told them they are completely old enough to not call me at work and get me involved in their arguments etc, and that i expect my house to be gorgeous when i get home. i try to work from home half of the day so i am not gone all day long.
yesterday they got done all that i expected, when i got home i did the check, and then they were able to do what they wanted. wyatt and emmett got some friends together and i dropped them at the reservoir to go fishing for a couple of hours and liv went swimming. she ended up with the pool to herself for a 1/2 hour--the community pool!
today the laundry has been folded, all the doors washed with a rag and a magic eraser, living room is dusted, and kitchen is clean. it feels good.
be happy! it only took me 19 years to figure it out.
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