No Encouraging the Prisoners, Please

Today is Friday, i.e., Housecleaning Day. Lest you think that sounds too “on top of things,” I’ll just say that if we didn’t do it on Friday, it probably wouldn’t get done. We each have appointed chores such as cleaning bathrooms, washing certain windows, dusting, vacuuming floors, and emptying trash cans.

The “system” seems to work well. My jobs are dusting and vacuuming the wood floors. Ethan, who tends to get out of most of the work around here mostly by being cute and younger than the rest of us, has one important job: Moving the shoes from one side of the utility room to the other so that I can vacuum up the grit. When I'm done, he moves them back. The rest of the morning he spends repeatedly relocating his army guy set ups (why does he always have to play army men on Friday in the middle of the floor?) If it's not on the rug, it's on the wood floors, and if it's not on the wood floors, it's on the rug...well, where else is there? Ok, my point was...

This is a very important job (Ethan's shoe moving) because if it doesn't get done, I can't vacuum, or worse yet, I have to interrupt my delicate vacuuming rhythm and do it myself. Usually I have to coax and beg several times before he'll do it. So this morning, not wanting to be tied up waiting on him to do his chore, I asked him early on while I was still dusting Mom's room, to please move the shoes. A short time later, while I was busy knocking glass trinkets off of Mom's dresser and sweeping up the pieces, Mom came in and said,

"Ethan moved the shoes out and now he's moving them back again, and it doesn't look like you've vacuumed yet."

"I haven't," I said.

Apparently he'd already been told to move the shoes and had done it like an obedient little darling, and when I told him to move them, he just moved them back. So, he'd just have to move them again. Yes, we're running a little concentration camp here. Just move the piles. Move them back. Move the piles again. No particular reason. Anything to demoralize the prisoners.

The "prisoner" had a pretty decent attitude, even after he had moved the shoes the fourth and last time, and had begun setting his army men up on the rug, right where I needed to vacuum next...