a tiny breakthrough

It used to be that I would often do something I thought I would never do. I would often clean up Lily's messes without even asking her to help. I mostly did this to avoid a battle. If there is one thing in parenting that I won't budge on, it's follow through. If I ask a kid to do something then I better be ready to follow through to the bitter end. Often I did not have the energy for the follow through required with my oldest child, so I just did it myself.

As the year has progressed, Lily has matured. She is much more likely to do what I ask, when I ask. It's a breakthrough, to be sure. However, it still took me awhile to get in the habit of making her clean up after herself. I did sometimes, but not much. I was gun shy from the early years, I guess.

I started with baby steps. I started with making sure that she was the one to hang up her backpack, put her shoes away and take her lunch box to the kitchen after school. Then I amped it up a bit. I started making her throw out the trash from her lunch box. And then finally, we graduated to making sure that if she got something out and brought it into the living room, bathroom, or kitchen, she was required to put it away.

I am happy to report that we no longer have battles to rival the Civil War. I am now just a mild annoyance to her everyday escapades. She generally does what I ask her to do without trouble. However, these days I am hearing a lot of "You make me do EVERYTHING at this house!" or "You don't make Drew or Julianna do all this cleaning!" or "I'm the ONLY ONE that has to do ANYTHING! You don't help me with ANYTHING anymore!!"

Now, mostly, this makes me laugh to myself. And for the record, Lily gets the behavior to avoid cleaning up tasks...or really anything her parents ask her to do....from me. It's true. I have to own the hours and hours and hours I went round and round and round with my parents (mostly Dad). I would still avoid these tasks if I wasn't the grown up. Also, the willingness to help, natural tendency to clean up after himself and general organization skills my son possesses, did not come from me.