Coffee fueled cleaning

Every few months or so, I hit my limit with the standards my family has when it comes to cleaning. This is the beef that moms have all of the world. I'm sure that a mom in some country on the other side of the world is grumping about their child's room condition...that is if they are out of bed right now. I never was good at time zone calculation and the date line and all that. Guess the hub will add that to his list of skills on his "Subjects I help my kids with in school" section on his resume. It gets bigger every year...mine gets smaller. Anyhoo, I hit the wall last night when I found the aftermath of F4 tornados in every room of our house, but I was too tired to start anything at that point. A new day arrived and, sleepy though I was, I readied my mind to make a new plan for cleaning...and for the fighting that comes with cleaning. I dropped the kids off, got back home and sat down for a minute to formulate a plan. Forty minutes later I woke up just in time to see Vincent D'Onofrio's Thor-esque golden locks from "Adventures In Babysitting" and cursed my sleepy self. I put a hurt on some coffee and headed to Target 'feined up and ready to go. When I returned, I was ready to go. My initial cleaning technique was to take all the offending items and put them in the middle of the floor. That infuriates them, so I made sure the pile was substantial. I put little white boards up in each of their high traffic areas and wrote instructions on them like "Put things away in their correct places" and "Little pieces of trash go in the trash can" and "Hug your mother". Thought I'd see if they still would since I knew they's be upset. I then set up their new commission system, informing them they would be charged 50c for every cleaning request and $1 for every fight, instigated or retaliated. Every charge went in the "Mom and Dad" bin for a movie night fund for us. We have $2 so far...made it 10 minutes after the rules were explained and we had fisticuffs. So sad. BUT, their rooms are clean and so is the playroom. We had a pleasant evening and got some good and funny reading done. I'll take that any day and will be happy if we never get to go on a movie date night financed by penalty payments. Stay tuned....


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