I admit that I am a natural born procrastinator. Procrastinators and house chores just doesn't go so well together. It's like mixing water and oil. My tendency to delay house chores constantly results in my house being a complete wreck. As much as I hate house chores, I can't tolerate mess either. Being around mess just brings out the worst in me.
I've always had a maid to attend to the house chores when I was growing up. On top of that, I lived with 3 neat freaks at home. My dad was consistently redecorating and rearranging the house. My mom was quite zealous when it comes to dealing with mess and if I was born to be a natural procrastinator, my sister is a natural born Nazi when it came to tidying up and keeping things in its exact order. I was constantly berated for my lack of tidiness and the constant chaos I tend to leave behind. However, since these three characters and the maid was always quick to clean up after me, who can blame me for being totally oblivious to mess? As far as I'm concern, I'm as tidy as tidy can be. :))
Then I married and even messier procrastinator. Guess there is truth to the saying, what goes around, comes around. Never have had to deal with mess, I am now overwhelmed by it. It wasn't so bad when it was just the two of us. Back then ADD was always flying so I had ample of time to clean after him. Even when he had days off, he was never around long enough to produce mess that I would consider unmanageable.
9 years later, we are now blessed with three little tikes whom have all inherited ADD's messy genes. (Yeah, blame the bad genes on the dad! Ha ha!) Seriously, if I had known how much mess children leaves behind, I would have definitely opted for a cat instead...err...maybe not, a fish!. A fish can do no wrong. Worst comes to worst, I could always flush it down the toilet! :P
The mess at home is so overwhelming, I'm currently campaigning for us to just leave everything behind and move house so I won't have to deal with this house anymore. ADD's only contribution towards house chores is to be the sole person responsible for taking out the garbage. Trying to convince him to take on more responsibility towards the house chores is a chore of its own. So now I'm determined to rope in my kids and make them help out. I've listed down the chores that they could help out with and am bribing them with stars for who does the most house chore. At the end of the week, if they manage to score at least 40 stars, I promised them a small surprise. It has been 2 weeks in and I'm yet to determine whether this strategy of mine works or not. So far, at the end of the week, the 2 older kids have scored an average of 19 stars each. I'll give this reward chart thing a couple more weeks and if it doesn't work and I'm still overwhelmed by house chores, I think I'll run away from home. I'll just use that huge mountain of unfolded clothes on the couch as decoy! ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment