Never Give in to The Baby

May 24, 2021

The baby is ten. I’ve been parenting for over 18 years now, been through all the nonsense and the poop and the puke, and I’m down to one last, not-a-teenager baby.

She’s ten.

Here’s the problem with being the baby of four kids. When three of the four kids DON’T cry and drool, they DON’T want someone to make them breakfast and lunch every day, they DON’T still leave Calico Critter crap on the ground for me to step on barefoot, it’s hard to remember that everyone was ten once. She’s just the last ten-year-old.

This morning during scripture study Georgia openly rolled her eyes at us. Like, over-exaggerated, I’ve-been-watching-too-much-disney-channel eye rolling. I gave her a chance to apologize. She did, WHILE ROLLING HER EYES AGAIN. So she got a Responsibility Chore.

This is a little parenting technique my sister Jenny taught me many moons ago. When a kid screws up, then they continue to screw up, you give them a Responsibility Chore. These are the chores mothers HATE to do. Things like scrubbing out all trash cans in the house, or wiping down all the baseboards. If the kid protests, they get a second chore. Then a third, and so on, until they hush their reckless mouth and get to work.

Georgia drew the “clean out under the kitchen sink” card–it’s a doozy. So she did what all babies do best. She cried.

And cried and cried and drooled and puddled and cried some more.

So I gave her a second cupboard, and then a third. Finally she stopped begging to be released from her responsibility and resorted to good old, “Everybody HATES me!” weeping while she clawed the flotsam out from under the detestable kitchen sink. I set a timer for ten minutes to come and check.

It has been 58 minutes and she is finally finished with cupboard #1. I haven’t gone toe to toe like this with her for a while (obviously). I literally had to go stand in the garage and blast my music at one point so I wouldn’t yell at her for slobbering all over my kitchen floor and NOT working. When I finally went in and praised her seven minutes ago, then pointed out her NEXT cupboard, the water works started again. I thought I was going to lose my mind.

However, I want you to know that she is quietly cleaning cupboard number two and there appears to be no additional crying coming from that room. I actually hear her reorganizing the pots and pans–and she isn’t throwing them–

UPDATE – SHE JUST CAME IN AND APOLOGIZED FOR BEING RUDE AND HUGGED ME. Then she asked if she could please not do the third cupboard…

This is where we often fail. We give in. They’re cute. They did kind of good there. They’re…the baby.

Don’t give in to the baby.

I lovingly walked into the kitchen, inspected her work, told her she’s done great, and pointed to the third cupboard. “One more sister, you’ll be done in five minutes!” She nodded at me, and headed back to work. With. No. Tears.

Parents, Romans, countrymen, I am here to remind us all that the baby needs to be parented as well. And my old techniques? The ones I kind of forgot because my older kids are mostly great? They still get the job done.

Don’t give in to the baby. Don’t EVER give in to the baby.

Filed Under: baby, discipline, housework, kids, parenting, Uncategorized

Just another excuse to stomp around the house

March 18, 2012

Don’t ask me what my problem is, but tonight I feel like a stick of dynamite just waiting for someone to walk by with a cigarette so I can blow their freaking head off.

Why do I do this?

I have great kids. They’re no better or worse than the next kids, and as far as nicely average goes I’d say they do all right. But for some totally illogical reason that probably has part to do with my hormone level and part to do with all the sugar I ate today (seriously, it affects my mood in the worst way) I feel like I’m about to rip somebody’s toes off.

Not that they’re perfect. I made cookie dough tonight so I could send treats back with all the empty pans littering my dining room from the post-accident dinners. I had to run overto the neighbor’s for a moment and when I came back over 2 cups of cookie dough–nearly half of what I’d made–was missing.

This is what happens when you trust an 8 and 6 year old to stay home alone for seven minutes while you run next door to drop something off.

The missing cookie dough (which I hate making and hate baking because I can’t stay out of it) meant that I had barely enough left to eek out the necessary amount of cookies.

So of course I burnt one of the pans because guess what? GERMAN OVENS DON’T HAVE TIMERS.

I think my real problem is that the house is a mess. I love Sundays but I must say that keeping the Sabbath Day Holy (in my case that means taking a rest from my day to day cleaning and cooking) is way harder than spending the day picking up and putting away like usual. My house is trashed and tomorrow is going to be really stupid.

This is a glimpse at tonight’s mood. I am sure that by the time the kids are tucked away in bed and Jason has done the dishes I’ll feel a whole lot better.

Man I wish there was a magic pill for grumpy. I hate grumpy.

Filed Under: cleaning, housework, mess, motherhood

Please honey, feel free to sweep it under the rug.

September 24, 2011

I woke up yesterday morning and went down to the kitchen. The kids were already busy devouring a healthy breakfast of leftover brownies from the night before. By the time the children were safely off to school and I was left alone with my morning chores, it looked like a herd of buffalo had tracked potting soil all over the kitchen.

And thus begun the day’s first of many attempts to keep my floors clean.

Here’s the thing about these awesome German houses: they don’t usually come with carpet. There is a reason wall-to-wall carpet has been such a big hit with Americans over the past four decades, and that’s because it’s flat out genius. You wonder why people covered up all those “beautiful” hardwood floors back in the sixties? Yeah, they’re called dust bunnies (not to mention bruised baby knees). No matter how hard I try, these floors refuse to stay clean for more than nineteen seconds at a time.

Until all my lovely rugs get here (right along with all our other mythical household goods) I’m stuck in nine hundred thousand square meters of tile. I am hating me some tile.

I usually sweep the kitchen/dining room/living area about five times a day, give or take a spill. Yes, I have a sweeper vac but it seems that at this stage of the game, we’re still dealing in scraps of half eaten plastic and paper trimmings, in addition to half of every snack making it’s way to the pool of spilled water on the floor. Soggy sweeping, what fun.

So the other night after we put the kids to bed, I shut off the downstairs lights and looked over in the kitchen. There was the remaining dinner evidence, smeared and dropped and tossed about the floor, and there was my nice, kind husband sweeping up the mess. I thought to myself, what a darling, angelic man out to serve his wife at the end of another thankless day.

“Honey,” I said, “Just leave it. I’ll sweep it up in the morning.”

And then my sweetheart gave me one of those slightly judgmental and overly patronizing looks that only spouses who spend their days at the office can properly pull off and said, “You know, you really should sweep this floor every day.”

It wasn’t about helping me out (which he routinely does, bless his heart), it was about “teaching by example.” Sweet little pupil, thinking the master doesn’t have any idea how to clean the floor.

And just before I verbally decapitated him I realized it: there is no way for someone who spends their days in a neat and tidy office to comprehend just how much debris children can come up with in a 16 hour period. No way but one, and I don’t have the energy or the patience to keep and collect all the well swept evidence just to prove to him that I’m not the lazy slob around here, they are.

Some things just aren’t worth the proof. I decided that in the future I will gladly sit back and watch any time he decides to give me a lesson on housekeeping. After all, it’s the respectful thing to do.

Filed Under: cleaning, housework, Jason, love, marriage, Uncategorized

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