Chores

I hate housework. It's true, and it's unfortunate. People who have 6 kids should either be a little bit OCD about cleaning, or be rich enough to afford someone else to do it for you - alas, I am neither. I especially despise multi-step chores - i.e, rinse dishes, load dishwasher, unload dishwasher; carry dirty clothes to the basement, sort, wash, dry, fold, put away. I have managed to delegate portions of these to other members of my family, but they are just as enthusiastic as I am about housework, so other steps are usually added - nag, yell, threaten, punish, and that kind of defeats the purpose of delegating.

Our latest attempt at coercing the little angels into helping out is a revolving chore chart. Basically, they have one different chore per day, and the chores rotate through the kids during the week. Apparently my kids are no longer motivated by stickers and stars. This seriously pisses me off. I mean, one lousy chore and they are not going to do it because the reward is not great enough - what.ever. Is it really too much to ask that they pick up the empty juice boxes all over the living room once a week? I assure you that I did not throw my juice box on the floor when I was done with it, so it's not as if they are cleaning up after me or something.

To add insult to injury, they do things to intentionally make more chores for me. Like leaving the silverware drawer open when they get a spoon for their cereal, so then Sam can't reach the chocolate milk they left out but he tries anyway and it spills in the drawer all over the clean silverware. Or putting clean clothes in the dirty laundry because they "don't have room in their drawer for them". Stealing my velcro rollers and sticking them all over the dog (not really another chore, but annoying nonetheless).

The only solution I can come up with is disposable everything - plates, silverware, clothes, sheets, towels. I don't know how successful it will be, but it will definitely cut out the multi-step business - it's worth a try for that alone.