Life Goes On

Well, I am mostly cried out now. Sunday was the hardest; then just little things were hard—buying a suit for Bruce to wear for the funeral, reading the obituary, seeing Mom at the viewing was extra hard. (OK. That one was not a little thing.) Walking to the gravesite and wondering why nobody had waited for Margaret to come . . . ow.

I was pretty lethargic the first part of the week, and little things still come up that will make me sad. But the now funeral is over, and our life goes on, and it's time to be doing again.

A few weeks ago I had posted my lofty goals for the year—among them, cleaning my bedroom. I made pretty good headway during the first week of January. I even built a second shelf in the top of my closet so I could store more of my junk—I mean, treasures. But now it looks like I've done nothing in there at all. Time to start over.

My kids don't know this yet, but I'm going to work them over too. When I went downstairs yesterday my entire laundry-room and the adjoining bathroom was about a foot high in dirty laundry. My kids really do seem to think that the laundry is entirely my duty (regardless of what certain polls might say). Then I peeked into the girls' room and then into Michael and Jason's room (which are both downstairs too). Yes, their rooms are also strewn with clothes, about a foot deep. Brandon and Ryan's room is not covered with clothes because I made them clean their room the other day; this means that their 100 cubic feet of laundry has all been shoved tightly into one hamper.

I just don't think I can take the stress of all that laundry on top of the trauma of this past week. After the laundry tour, I looked around the rest of the house. It needs some work too.

Here is my evil plan: I'm going to hide all the Wii remotes, remove computers from Michael and Jason's room and ban all movies and trips to the library. NO privileges until I see that they can clean up and maintain some cleanliness. I have always wanted to limit video games and movies to the weekends (actually I'd like to eliminate video games entirely). And now I'm going to do it. I'm really going to do it.

I'm thinking 2 hours—maybe four hours of TV time on the weekend (that allows one or two movies—we don't watch regular TV), and 30 minutes of video/computer-game time for each kid on the weekend. (This actually translates to four hours of game time per child since they all sit around and watch each other play like it's the be-all, end-all of all time. BO-ring!) Of course, all this weekend fun depends on the imrovement of the work ethic.

The banishing of our weekly library trip may seem extreme until you realize that many of the books get lost each week, due to the disaster they are dumped in, and therefore we pay enough in fines to finance the entire library system every year. So, yeah, the library is banned too. At least until the afore-mentioned improved work ethic.

Well the kids are at school right now, but in for a big surprise when they get home. In the meantime I will get back to work on my own bedroom.

The real question is this: Who can hold out longer, the kids or me?