Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Daddy's Little Helper

My youngest daughter insists on helping me with the housework. Which means I have to do twice the amount of clean-up than I would've if she'd just kept watching "The Wonder Pets".

How does she help? Let me count the ways...
1) She uses the toilet brush to clean the bathroom floor.
2) She fills her emptied Mr. Potato Head bucket with water and a bunch of SoftSoap from the dispenser to use with the toilet brush to clean the bathroom floor, the toilet seat, and the sink.
3) She rips the sheets off of her bed and hides them.
4) She tosses all of the just-matched socks from the laundry basket to the four corners of the bedroom.
5) She draws on the walls so I have something to use my Magic Erasers on.
6) She feeds the cats with handfulls of dry food wherever they might be sleeping. On top of the armchair. Underneath the kitchen table. On the bed.

That's just a start. And yet I don't yell and I don't scream at her, even though she often leaves things worse than they were before. Why? Because when my oldest daughter was her age, I caught her using the toddler wipes to clean the bathroom and toilet seat; as she finished with each wipe, she'd drop it in the toilet. When I found her, she'd completely clogged the toilet. I yelled and screamed and chased her out of the bathroom. We had to call the plumber to unclog the toilet; he ended up having to completely remove the toilet from the floor to get to all the wipes that were still in our pipes. And my oldest daughter never offered to help clean ever again. I think it's because she's afraid of doing something wrong and I'll yell and scream at her again.

So this time I'm grateful for daddy's little helper. I teach her little by little what to do and sometimes she listens and most of the time she doesn't. It's easier to repair damage you can see than the damage you can't.

1 comment:

Adri Cowan said...

this is really cute. it made me smile!