Yesterday, I just wanted the children, ages 7, 9, and 16....to pick up in a small area. Literally...it was a portion of one room. It was not horribly messy, but, they had a few small pieces of trash, they had dropped some DVDs in the floor, and they had a couple of their magazines on the floor. Once they picked up their own stuff, they needed to sweep and vaccum the area. It was maybe a 10 by 10 area at most. DH and I were bringing home a new couch from a store maybe 2 miles away. We were not having it delivered but bringing it from the store ourselves. We had to make 2 trips. The cleaning should have taken, literally, 10 minutes at most. We left. Took about 30 minutes for us to pay and get the first couch in to the van. Drove home, found the kids did not touch the area. Asked why. 16 yr old said the younger kids refused to do it. Asked him why he did not do it. He said they refused. Again, why didn't HE do it. THEY refused he says. I told him he needs to do it, it was a small chore and I would have given them something else. I talked to the kids and said I am serious. They MUST clean up the space now. This next trip is going to be shorter as we already paid and all. DH and I left. Got back in 15 minutes. Nope..they had not touched it. I quickly cleaned. Disgusted by what is going on. DH is mad. DH says the plastic will NOT come off the new couches until they do this. The kids kind of sit around not doing it. DH sees in the kitchen that the kids got in to the last of the brownies while we were gone and spilled them all over the floor. Now DH is really mad. He leaves the room. I tell the kids I am going to take their dad out to cool down. He has worked very hard and they have been doing nothing (which is true. DH will clean the entire kitchen, step out to work for an hour, come back to them having trashed something).
I took DH out to eat and then we went to Block Buster. I called a few times reminding the kids to sweep the kitchen floor and pick their stuff off the living room floor, as they had been told to do multiple times today. Come home..and even find the spoon still sitting on the floor...in the living room...in the same exact spot it was in that morning!!!!
I am fed up. DH is ticked. There is no reason why we have to continue to be ignored. My dh works all day and then faces endless messes while these boys refuse to even so much as pick their own books off the floor, Legos, anything. They should be doing chores that go beyond just picking up their own books and such. It is not unreasonable for children this age to sweep up in the kitchen. Especially not unreasonable when you realize that they are the ones who got in to the brownies and dropped them on the floor and just walked away.
I hate to make the day all about just being angry and such. But, I have put up every remote in the house and every computer anything. A number of things have been damaged because they leave them where the 1 yr old can reach them. They left out some nice books and the 1 yr old tried to read them and pages got ripped out as a result. Just saying they lose those books as a consequence is not good enough because these were books I needed and wanted too. They took out the snap circuits which had instruction books and I asked them specifically to pick them up and they did not. I made a list and put the snap circuits on there. My 16 yr old came to me and said it was cleaned up. Instead, when I came in to the room the next day, I found the book of instructions ripped up.
FYI, I am very pregnant and having complications. I spend much of most says being sick and it is not getting better. I have 7.5 weeks left of being this sick. I am guessing maybe even sicker. I do what I can. But facing the tornado that these kids do is really getting to me.
Maybe this is just a vent and I already know what to do. I am taking away every single privieledge and every single thing I have to clean up myself is going in to storage for them to not play with again until they earn back. I am just fed up with seeing boys run and play and goof off and sit there, feeling so sick I am in tears, and then come out to find a 16 yr old say he could not pick a simple magazine off the floor because his little brothers did not do it.
By the way, the 16 yr old's room is trashed too.
