PARENTING SECRETS

With graduation only a week away, I forced all my children to help me clean house yesterday. I will let you in on a couple of little parenting secrets which I learned several years back. When you are forcing your children to help you clean, do not call to them in a chipper voice saying, "All hands on deck!" Then when you give them a job, don’t say, "When you’re finished, report back to me!" I mistakenly thought the use of these fun military-like phrases would make my children feel like little soldiers in our war against dirt and grime. Instead, they begged me to stop. And they asked me to quietly leave them a list of every job that needed doing and then to go away. Very rude, if you ask me. But that’s what I do now, and it seems to be working.

Rachel cleans my kitchen floor for me. She’s always had to do it on her hands and knees because the uneven texture of the tile traps dirt. But I did give her one of those stadium cushions to kneel on while she scrubs, so please don’t report me to child services. Anyway, she’s tried all sorts of sponges and brushes to make the job easier, but we haven’t hit on just the right tool for the job. So yesterday I took her to the store and we stood in the cleaning tools aisle and surveyed our options. We debated the advantages and disadvantages of brush after brush, and then we found these amazing mops with hard bristles on one side for "stubborn dirt". And I could tell she was a bit overwhelmed by all the choices, and then she started asking how much this mop was, and that brush. So I told her, "Honey, you can get anything you want here! Pick anything you like!" And she says I started gesticulating (her word) wildly, indicating that the sky was the limit when it came to buying cleaning tools for her. At which point, we both started to laugh and since we were starting to call attention to ourselves, we quickly selected the mop with bristles and moved on. And by the way, while we were checking out, she asked me for this warhead sour spray, which I find disgusting, but since it was on clearance I bought it for her. It
was the least I could do.

We ate at our local Mexican restaurant for lunch. I had a crispy flour taco and rice. But the real food highlight of the day was later when the girls and I went to a Mother-Daughter tea at church, where we had chicken salad, fresh berries, and cheesecake. Scrumptious!