Whistle while you work
Growing up my sisters and I used to do chores. I remember we had a chore chart and it rotated. One week I might be assigned the living room and dining room (which means I needed to sweep, dust and vacuum and put away things). The next week I might be assigned the bathroom which meant cleaning the tub, the sink, the toilet, and mopping the floor. We each had one night a week where we did dishes, which meant we washed and dried the dishes from dinner and breakfast. Even my littlest sister Tina who was about six, participated.
Our inside chores were done on Saturdays, and at the end of the day, my dad would put on his white gloves from when he was in the Air Force, and check each room for dust lol. We would each wait in baited breath for him to check our room, and I remember my dad swiped the top of the door trim in MY room I had cleaned, and of course there was dust. I remember laughing and saying “DAD, I can’t even reach up there” and he laughed too. But he was trying to teach us to do more than what we thought we needed to do, to do a good job. We looked forward to having our jobs rotated so we could have easy days and not just hard days. (One of the chores was to just empty the trash).
I remember we also had to do chores OUTSIDE. My dad divided our yard into five parts and gave each one of us a part. If we all did a great job, he promised to take us to the beach. Having a goal that was fun made the chore worthwhile and also made it a team effort. I do not think we always acted like a team, but my dad was trying to introduce that concept to us.
I guess I grew up thinking that chores were just a part of life, and that they could be fun and could be cooperative. I remember the movie Mary Poppins, and how she sang the song about a spoonful of sugar, when doing chores…in other words, for children to learn to love work, the work probably needs to be conveyed to them as necessary but also fun. Whether or not something is fun, depends on the perspective, and a parent can facilitate a happy perspective.
My daughter said that when she wanted her girls to make their beds, and put away their toys, they dragged their feet. She said that when she joined them, and put on happy music, and they danced with their toys putting them away, and helped each other make the beds, the girls were laughing and had fun. She said that after a while, they were able to do simple chores on their own and do the chores willingly and with joy.
I have always loved the work that I do, helping people lose weight and get strong, while raising five children, and writing and painting. I hope that my love of what I do has translated to my children because it is a virtue, to be able to work hard and do a good job. Hard work translates into better chances for success. Parents do not do any favors to children by letting little ones avoid work, or do a shoddy job because laziness does not help make children an asset in the real world.
I have also found that an orderly home makes for a relaxing and a fun place to be. My husband and I were trying to clean our own house because his brothers are coming to visit. We decided that the reason our house gets messy is because we both have too many things we consider “treasures” that we are unwilling to part with.
For example, my husband and I love the Astros, and he has all the bobble-heads for the players. I say that the pennants, the shirts, the hats, the trading cards and the photos and news papers editions are enough to keep and those bobble heads take up a lot of room and need to go. He agreed, but at the last minute, he kept them all, except the Verlander bobble-head. lol.
He put the bobble-heads all right back up in that cabinet. In stacks. lol (notice how I am telling you about all the things HE is keeping, and not a word about all the things I am keeping haha).
Well all I can say is at least our rooms now are not dusty and are clean and we had fun helping each other do the work. I cannot whistle while I work but I am happy to do work and so is he. We are happy to have family come to visit.
We can take inventory of what we have and what we really need, and be grateful. In doing this work we found a piece of the Berlin Wall that his brother had given him, from when he was stationed in Germany in the Army, that we thought we had lost.
“The Berlin Wall Speech was delivered by United States President Ronald Reagan in West Berlin on June 12, 1987. The speech is commonly known by a key line from the middle part: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!Reagan called for the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to open the Berlin Wall, which had encircled West Berlin since 1961.”
In the USA, like in Berlin, there is no wall between parents and their kids, or between between brothers and sisters that makes work unproductive or too difficult. The literal wall dividing Germany is now gone as is the virtual wall of contrasting opinions, dividing parents from their children, and siblings from each other. The work that we do, cooperatively, has blessings for each of us and I am grateful. Work is fun, work is necessary, and work is what we do best.