My friends Danielle and Matt spent the weekend with us. After they left this afternoon, I asked Alyssa to take her laundry basket of clean clothes into her room and put them away, and to pick up the toys she had scattered this morning. She said okay, and about fifteen minutes later she came back out to let me know that she had finished, and her room was “all clean” — her exact words. I didn’t go into her room to check, but when I glanced from the hallway, it looked as if everything was in perfect order, so that was that. I was looking forward to dosing myself with Dayquil and taking a nap — the next best thing to seeing someone in a lab coat, since that’s kind of hard to do on a Sunday night.
About an hour after that I went into her room with her to set her up for some quiet time, and imagine my surprise and annoyance when I discovered that she had simply taken all of the scattered toys and the laundry basket full of clean, folded clothes and dumped everything at the foot of her bed (which is not visible from the hallway or even the doorway). When I asked her why she did that, she said it was because she didn’t like chores and didn’t want to clean up. I’m not going to lie… I kind of went a little batshit. I told her right then and there that she was not coming out of her bedroom for the rest of the afternoon, and when I was ready for her to come out she wouldn’t until everything was in its proper place. I also banned her from any video games and computer games for the rest of the day.
Argh… I was so pissed that she lied, and even more pissed at her defense of, “well, I didn’t want to do it”. As my grandmother told my mother and my mother told me, tough shit. There’s a lot of stuff in life that you don’t want to do, but will have to do anyway. Even now, as sick as I am, I still can’t take a break from being a mother, from changing Ryan’s diapers, from making dinner (though “dinner” was just re-heated pizza, a far cry from the homemade vegetable tuna casserole I was originally going to make tonight), even from doing a bit of laundry. Even if I wanted to shop for personalized jewelry, I can’t, because there’s mom and wife stuff to do.
So yeah. That annoyed me, hah. To her credit, Alyssa did clean up her room the right way the second time around, she apologized for lying to me and making an even bigger mess, and she even helped me fold some laundry tonight. 
My name is Jenn, and I'm 27 years old. I'm happily married to my best friend and soulmate, Daniel. Together we have a six year old daughter named 
Name: Alyssa
Name: Ryan
You did the right thing. She needed to see that you went bat shit over it because if not it would happen again. Maybe this way she will get it. Sydney doesn’t get it. She’d rather throw a fit and waste all that energy on going crazy rather than just doing it.
.-= Ranee´s last blog ..Weekend Hiatus =-.