My kids are driving me nuts at the moment. I mean, how friggin’ hard is it to put your socks in the laundry basket when you take them off?!
To try help us them, we’ve introduced a very simple routine for the afternoons. Once they enter the house they’re to take out their lunchbox, empty it, then place it on the kitchen bench. Next they take out their homework and put it one the table, placing their bag into their own special bag shelf. Shoes, once removed, go in their own special colour coded shoe box beneath their school bag, and socks are to be taken to the laundry basket.
Can you guess which part of this they’re struggling with?
That’s right. All of it!
“Whose are these?!” I yelled out this afternoon. I was in the lounge room which, except for the dirty socks on the floor, looks almost exactly unlike a laundry.
Miss9 walked past at that moment and glanced where I was pointing.
“I’m not touching them,” she said. “They’re not mine.”
Then she hightailed it out of room.
At which point I asked if she wouldn’t mind rejoining me – only I didn’t do it anywhere near as politely as that sentence made out.
Pointing to a different pair of socks a whole meter away from the other pair, I snapped, “And those?”
“Oh, yeah, they’re mine,” she said, her tone inferring I’d somehow stupidly meant the other two.
“Well?” I asked pointedly.
“I don’t want to touch them. They’re dirty.”
Meanwhile somewhere in the dining room, Master11 was struggling to find everything he needed to head out again with his cousins.
“Dad, I can’t find my socks!” he yelled.
The one exception to removing your socks after school is if you need to go out again. I went to hollersplain this to him but Miss9 was quicker to open her mouth.
“They’re in here,” she called, managing to say in three words what I was going to cuss in about forty.
He promptly arrived looking for all the world like he’d like to have a word with the person who’d dumped them there. I was about to join him when something rather surprising happened.
Miss9 was suddenly beside me with a screwed up expression on her clearly disgusted face and two gingerly held socks held outstretched to her brother.
“Here,” she hissed through tight lips.
“Thanks!” he said, snatching them off her and and racing out of the house.
“That was very lovely of you,” I told her, because I know what it would have taken for her to pick them up.
But she still had a job to do.
“Now,” I continued, “pick up your socks and put them in the laundry where they belong please.”
“Oh, they’re not mine,” she grinned, and raced off.
Luckily for us all, Master11 isn’t as big a germaphobe as Miss9, although no doubt he’s going to think wearing his sister’s dirty socks is yuck.
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Raising a family on little more than laughs.
