We don’t really…do the dishes.
We let them sit for a few days, then panic because something smells terrible, or we have no clean spoons, or have to way to cook more food because the top of the stove is covered in old straws and cookie sheets. (We aren’t that great at adulting. If you wanted to read something beautiful about a life with people who do magical things like clean, pay the bills as soon as they get them, or mop the floor, maybe you should find a different website. The Crate and Barrel catalogue perhaps?)
We have great hopes that as soon as the boys are older, or as soon as we get more sleep, or as soon as we follow The Three Steps to Becoming Good at Time Management we will suddenly be imbued with the abilities to live our lives like normal responsible adults. I’ll keep you updated on how that goes.
Anyway, usually our delightful quirks usually only result in messes for us that we try to clean before friends stop by (which only results in it being marginally clean according to other people’s standards), and better balancing skills from stacking the dishes. I also firmly believe we are helping our sons, the baby especially, by making him learn to walk around all the things on the living room floor. No easy way out here! If you want to take four steps you need to go over the diaper wipes and around the train track. (This is the sort of thing they do in physical therapy, right? I’m just going above and beyond in my role as a parent.)
But the other night we really paid for our free spirited lifestyle. And it was the most innocent thing….cold coffee left on the table. At 5:45 pm I turned around to see the toddler throwing back the last half cup that had sat there since breakfast. Apparently, to my toddler, cold coffee is just the most delicious thing in the world. After we got the mug away from him, he actually asked us to make more.
At 8:30pm he had been out of his room about four times and woken up the baby once. At 9:00 we got him up and read, played games and did anything else we could think of. We were also exhausted so we tried to make him believe that we were playing an awesome game of ‘pretend sleeping’ but that didn’t fly. At 10:00 we decided that since we had been up half the night before with the baby that it was at least bedtime for us. It turns out that if everything else fails, telling him Mama and Daddy are going to bed and turning off all the lights in the house will sometimes work if nothing does. (After a while, of course.)
So, if you are bad at adulting, do it for your kids. Not for their sense of responsibility or when they move in with someone other than you and that other person expects them to keep up their half of the house, but just because it will actually help you sleep at night.
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