raising godzillas

If you want something done at all...

If you know me, you also know that the last thing I am is lazy. Like most of us, however, I find that when somebody, anybody in my house does a regular chore, I balk at being expected to do that. Such is the case with changing the beds. Anywhere from 48 to 50 weeks a year, my dear husband spends his Sunday mornings, while the kids and I are at church, changing the sheets on all the beds and washing them. Then, something like Father's Day or Easter or one of our kids getting baptized or confirmed will come along and that gets thrown off.
Point of note: if my husband's morning is disrupted and he doesn't get the beds changed before lunch, he considers the window closed. For the whole week.
Since I do not like sleeping in my ow filth, I have to make sure bed-changing happens on these days. But I hate it, and  never do it quite as well as the man. The first part of my tactic to to make my kids do their own beds. After all, if they do a slapdash job, *I* won't have to deal with it.
Now, let me digress briefly to explain that one of the best ways to get my husband to do something is to start doing it myself. Sometimes I'm going into the thing committed finishing it; but if you think that on two different occasions I started painting one of the kids' rooms right before I expected him home from work, knowing he'd be horrified at the wrongness of my method and insist on taking over, you wouldn't be wrong.
But today: the husband's work had them in all Sunday morning for a mandatory store cleaning. He actually got home well after we'd eaten lunch. After giving him some time to settle back in and decide playing Halo against the eldest was *not* fun, I asked him about the beds getting changed.
"Sure, you do that", he said.
I dragged myself away from my books, announced to the kids that they'd be making their own beds today, and dragged everything off our bed onto the floor. My husband walks in, horrified that our blankets and pillows are on the dirty floor (This is when I declined to mention that if I'm rotating clothes loads on the line and don't feel like going in for a second basket, I may just dump the wet laundry onto the lawn while I pile dry clothes into the basket). After noticing that our teenagers had not started making their beds, he turned off the wi-fi and came back to start making our bed. I tell him he's not allowed to die or become incapacitated until I can afford to hire someone to do this for me every week.
Did I know my wrong bed making would inspire my husband to take over? Yes. Do I feel guilty?  Not a bit.

posted by gojirama @ 3:07 PM