Household Tips Aimed at Children and Husbands

Instead of leaving your trash on the counter beside the trash can, why can't you put it in the trash can? Seriously, you're right there by the trash can. It takes no extra effort to put it in the trash can versus leaving it on the counter. It also takes no extra time, so don't tell me that you're going to be late. And haven't you been taught since you were young to throw trash away in the trash can? So telling me you forgot isn't going to cut it either.

The same goes for laundry. It only takes an extra, I don't know, ten seconds maybe, to put your clothes in the hamper instead of leaving them on the bathroom floor. Or the bedroom floor.

I guess I will rebel and stop washing anything that doesn't get in the hamper. Didn't get your jeans washed for school? Oops. My bad. Didn't get any underwear in that day's wash? Oh well, I guess that's your problem. I only do laundry twice a week and if your dirty laundry isn't in the hamper, it won't get washed.

I refuse to walk around the house picking up your trash and your laundry when you are perfectly capable of doing that yourself with hardly any extra effort. But if I have to do that for five people besides myself, it ends up taking a lot more time than if you would just help me out.

Seriously.

Why is this such a hard concept?

The Great Food Battle

I have a four-year-old who literally whines ALL day that he's hungry. Every ten to fifteen minutes, he'll come to me, "Mom, I'm hungry!" Even if we just ate.

Then when I serve lunch, he requests a certain type of sandwich or chicken nuggets or a quesadilla. So I make it, mistakenly thinking that if he's asked for it, it's what he really wants, so he'll eat it. He takes about two bites and declares himself full and wants to get down from the table.

In today's modern theories of child-rearing, it is said to not use dessert as a bribe. But my children will certainly not get dessert if they don't touch their food at all. Sometimes I barter: "Take three more bites and you can have dessert." But that's tricky because then they start putting one pea on their spoon and calling it a bite.

I've also read that you should offer lots of choices. I have a hard enough time thinking of a main dish and a couple sides seven nights a week, so offering more than that is next to impossible. Plus, then, what if all they ever eat is the fruit? I always serve a fruit side (usually a mixed fruit salad), a vegetable, and the main dish, which is often something like spaghetti or beef stew.

My parents would sometimes make us sit there until we ate our food. I remember one particularly stubborn brother would sit there for hours, refusing to touch his food. Then they would cover his plate and put it in the fridge and he would have to eat it for breakfast the next morning. I'm not sure that worked.

So do you have any tricks that work? Because I'm getting desperate.

A Letter to the President

As a family, we've been reading at the end of Alma, in the "war years" of the Book of Mormon. This morning we read in Alma 60. This is part of a letter from Moroni, the captain of the Nephite armies, to Pahoran, the chief-judge over the Nephites. Can you imagine if our general wrote such a letter to our president today?

v.14: "I fear exceedingly that the judgments of God will come upon this people, because of their exceeding slothfulness, yea, even the slothfulness of our government, and their exceedingly great neglect towards their brethren, yea, towards those who have been slain."

v. 15: "For were it not for the wickedness which first commenced at our head, we could have withstood our enemies that they could have gained no power over us."

v. 18: "But why should I say much concerning this matter? For we know not but what ye yourselves are seeking for authority. We know not but what ye are also traitors to your country."

v. 20: "Have ye forgotten the commandments of the Lord your God? Yea, have ye forgotten the captivity of our fathers? Have ye forgotten the many times we have been delivered out of the hands of our enemies?"

v. 21: "Or do ye suppose that the Lord will still deliver us, while we sit upon our thrones and do not make use of the means which the Lord has provided for us?"

v. 28: "Yea, behold I do not fear your power nor your authority, but it is my God whom I fear; and it is according to his commandments that I do take my sword to defend the cause of my country, and it is because of your iniquity that we have suffered so much loss."

Can you imagine if the leaders of our nation got such a letter today? What an uproar it would cause? It's amazing how applicable this entire chapter is to our day.

Love Thy Neighbor

I am not a good neighbor. I have a hard time reaching outside my shell to meet new people and talk to them. When we lived in apartments, we never bothered with getting to know neighbors. Many times, people moved so frequently that we would find out who they are and within a month or two, they'd be gone.

When we moved to our first house, I was excited to have neighbors. Then we learned that the house next door was an investment house and often it was empty, no renters. During the nearly 4 years we owned that house, there were about 5 different families that lived in that rental house next door. Most of the time, they were hardly ever home, and I never really bothered getting to know any of them.

As for the rest of the street, I met and chatted with the neighbors across the street a couple of times, and the neighbors to the left of us hit our car that was parked on the street once, so we met them but didn't ever really talk to them again.

When we moved here, I swore it would be different. On move-in day, I went over and met the next door neighbor. After that, she never really even said hello to me in passing, and then it got awkward. How do I try to be friends with someone who appears to have no interest in a friendship? Our kids play together, but we still hardly ever exchange words. And now we've lived here a year. I hardly know what to do. We also don't know the rest of the neighbors that share our driveway. One of the things is that they are never home. Hard to get to know someone who isn't there.

Growing up, I always knew the neighbors. Now that I'm the grown-up, I really have no idea how to approach it. I'm too shy and chicken.

Why is it so hard to be a good neighbor?

My Love/Hate Relationship

I have a love/hate relationship with sports. I love playing sports. I love supporting my kids and any other family members throughout the ages in sports. I even love watching certain sports.

But professional sports really irritate me.

I remember reading in the book Jurassic Park a certain character's opinion of professional baseball. He said something along the lines that it was just a bunch of grown men with bats swatting at balls. To put it that way spun a whole new light on professional sports.

Take a look at the typical professional athlete. They spend all their time playing a game. Are they contributing something worthwhile to society in their profession? Not really. Some of it is entertaining, but at an enormous cost. Most of the professional athletes I've heard of, their personal lives are severely screwed up. They act like children, like glorified teenagers. They are prideful and arrogant. They have way too much money and spend it on atrocious things. Sure, some of them are parents with children. I'm sure some of them are even pretty good people. But it sure seems like an overwhelming majority of professional athletes are exactly what I said before...glorified teenagers.

I love to watch college football--especially my favorite teams--BYU (of course), Michigan, and a few others. In fact, we are going to attend a BYU game this season, the entire family. I'm excited. The kids all have BYU T-shirts to wear and I even bought cute little matching bows for my daughter's hair.

I also love watching sports like gymnastics, both men's and women's, and many other Olympic sports. But I think that's where my line is--I like amateur sports but professional sports just annoy me.

So when it's football season and the great football gods of the NFL seem to rule the TV on a pretty regular basis, I get pretty steamed up. I think watching professional sports is a colossal waste of time. Think of all the hours people spend sitting on their bums in front of the TV during football season (or baseball season, or basketball season) watching grown men play sports and behave like children.

So that is my love/hate relationship. I love sports--I loved participating in gymnastics, basketball, volleyball, softball growing up. I enjoyed supporting my husband in college football and loved attending college football games myself when I was a student. I enjoy catching a college game now and then on TV. I enjoy going to local high school games--both basketball and football. I love having my kids play baseball, football and hopefully try soccer and basketball. Maybe even gymnastics.

But watching adults play their sport for huge salaries? That is just wrong in my book.

How Little Control We Really Have

Occasionally you have those experiences that remind you how little control you really have over anything. My children have all been perfectly healthy. Aside from my oldest being born five weeks early, which was truly a huge surprise and the doctors gave no reason for the prematurity--no infections, no loss of amniotic fluid, no problems whatsoever, my children have all been perfectly healthy from day one. They hit all their milestones at the right times, even early.

So it was a surprise when my 3-year-old (he'll be four next week) suddenly started having problems with his eyes crossing and then balance issues. I took him to the pediatrician, fully expecting just a referral to a pediatric opthamalogist. But he failed his neurological exam because of his balance issues, so she issued bloodwork and set him up for an MRI to check for a possible brain tumor.

The bloodwork came back negative. All the results were normal and perfect. That ruled out leukemia and a few other things. But the MRI came back with something. Cysts in his brain. The pediatrician does not know the significance of the cysts and doesn't want to start a battery of blood tests without consulting a pediatric neurologist first.

So that is where we are. We will be seeing a pediatric neurologist and also a pediatric opthamalogist in the next few weeks.

Part of me feels certain that it's nothing and all will be okay. But there is the teensiest part of me that wonders if this could be a sign of a huge underlying problem.

And then I realized how little control I have over any of this. Just life in general. It's been a powerful reminder of who is really in charge. And I guess if the one in charge sees fit to give my child some major health issues, so be it. I can't do anything about it. I hope this is not the case. I always imagined this child, who always has been extremely well-coordinated, as an athlete. Maybe that won't be the case.

I just have to remember that God is in charge and He has a plan.

Particular

All of us have those things that we refuse to relinquish, no matter the cost. We think it is more important than most other things and can't understand why others don't feel the same way.

Some of us feel that way about breastfeeding. They breastfeed at any cost, and do it for sometimes more than 2 years. I believe that breastmilk is definitely the best food for a baby, but I also recognize, having experienced it myself, that sometimes when mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy, and that unhappiness can be caused by breastfeeding. After trying for several months with constantly screaming, hungry infants, I always ended up switching to bottles and formula at about 4 months. The change was magical for me--no more screaming babies, a more relaxed, peaceful mom, and much happier, more well-rested days.

Some of us feel that way about carseats. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a lawbreaker. One should definitely follow the law and have children in appropriate carseats. But there are sometimes occasions where the car being used doesn't have the right carseat, for whatever reason, like in an emergency, and the best thing to do is to buckle up and drive carefully. Of course, you should always drive carefully. But I'm not going to advocate rear-facing carseats for 3-year-olds or insist that my 7-year-old is in a 5-point harness. As long as my carseats are legal and not breaking any laws, I will be satisfied with that.

Some of us are that way about natural childbirth. I'm sure it's probably a very intimate experience. But I believe that if you want to have pain relief, that doesn't make you a bad mom. I opted to have epidurals for all four births. I still feel like I had a deeply spiritual and intimate experience--I just got to do it without feeling any pain. I'm not going to go around telling people they should have an epidural just because that's the way I did it. More power to you if you want to have a natural birth or a water birth or even a home birth. And if you had a c-section, that's fine too. As long as you and the baby came through it all healthy, why does it matter which way the baby is born?

What am I particular about? I have no tolerance for a messy house. I prefer to live in a house that I can walk through without stepping on dirty clothes and toys. I prefer to live in a house with a kitchen that has clean, sticky-free counters and table and chairs. Yes, I wash my kitchen chairs regularly. My dishes always get done after each meal, or at least twice a day (sometimes I let the lunch dishes sit until dinner). My bathrooms are cleaned at least once a week by me, and several times a week by the kids. I do not like having to use a bathroom where the toilet has pee stains and evidence of the last person's emissions in the bowl. I do not like brushing my teeth in a sink that is covered in toothpaste residue and where the mirror has water spots. My carpets get vacuumed several times a week, sometimes every day. And I don't like dealing with dust, picking up something and having to blow off the dust, like a piano book or a magazine. And like many of you who are particular about other things, I can't understand why anybody would want to live in an environment that is less clean. Now that my children are older, they are able to help out more.

So, what is it that you are particular about? What really bugs you when people don't do it or do it differently (Though you'd never probably say it)?