My children adhere to the prevalent belief that household chores were created to make them suffer. When summertime increases their “I’m bored – I have nothing to do” time, extra chores are added in to increase the level of complaining. Why murmur when one can grumble? Why grumble when one can whine? Why whine when one can complain? Why complain when one can throw a fit?
The Manry children have been reluctantly adjusting to their chore schedule and are dragging out the completion of chores as long as possible.
Except for Gabe.
Gabe wakes up at 7am, goes outside and mows the lawn, comes back inside and practices his piano, and then puts away the dishes. Gabe is usually done with all his chores by 1030am. Several days over the past two weeks, Gabe was finished with his chores before Josiah even woke up.
Gabe wants to get it done and get it over with, and the dish order is where he exerts his control. We have a small kitchen with only a few cabinets and the placement of the dishes in those cabinets has become Gabe’s domain.
Unfortunately, I have a more willy-nilly order of dish placement in both the dishwasher and the cabinets. It is all a bit haphazard. I inherited this haphazard dish placement from my mother who is not only haphazard but will make everyone’s cabinets haphazard when she comes to visit. Inevitably, our dishwasher haphazardness forces my daughter or my sister to rearrange the dirty dishes in a more sensible manner.
When Gabe took over emptying the dishwasher, he explained to me the new order of the silverware drawer. He went over it piece by piece informing me which spoons went this way and that way and which forks were allowed to be stacked on top. He slightly reordered the plates and glasses, but it was the coffee cups which drew his consternation. For those who don’t recall the blog behind our tagline “home is where the coffee cup is,” Dale’s coffee cup collection has been a source of marital dispute for some years.
With the coffee cups, Gabe decided to take matters into his own hands. He quizzed family members on which cups they actually used and then relocated the others to the basement shelves to join their banished brethren.
Being too short, Zeke could never see the cup menagerie in the kitchen cabinets and figured (quite reasonably) I had given all his special cups away. Lucky for him, he can see the basement cabinets and yesterday found his longed for Christmas cups. He brought them upstairs and proclaimed in excitement “Look what I found in the basement! My cups!”
“Put those back right now!” Gabe declared.
“Who are you?” Abby asked. “The Sheriff of the Dishes?”
Yes, in fact he is, so Abby made him a cardboard star proclaiming it.
If you happen to see a long haired 12 year old boy with a “Sheriff of the Dishes” star pinned to his shirt, I suggest you take the cup offered you and keep your peace.
