Someone's in the Kitchen With Dinah

I happened to listen in on a fight in the kitchen last week. Alright, fights happen in the kitchen nearly every day of the week and I hear most of them. The kids take turns, two at a time, doing the dinner dishes. Two children divvying chores makes for arguments.

This particular fight revolved around the pots and pans. A favorite disagreement is the loading dishwasher/one pot vs. scrubbing counters/one pot, with an extra pot to throw things off. There are usually three pots, or just one. Things just never seem fair. But I hadn't heard this one before. Join me?

Kid 1: You get to wash the glass pan (the Pyrex 13x9 that had held baked pork chops).

Kid 2: No, I'll load the dishwasher, scrub the counter and do the other pot. YOU do the glass pan.

Kid 1: No! I'll load the dishwasher, scrub the counter, do the other pot, clean your room and scrub the toilet if you'll wash the glass pan.

Kid 2: NO!!! I'll load the dishwasher, scrub the counter, do the other pot, clean your room, scrub the toilet, clean the litter box and do all of your laundry if you'll wash the glass pan.

Kid 1: Nooooo, I'll ...

You get the gist. I would have wound up with a sparkling clean house at some point, but NOOOOOO, my curiosity got the better of me. I had to walk into the kitchen to find out why on earth no one wanted the glass pan. Get this - when washing the glass pan, they can see all of the gunk on it. It never comes off in the first scrubbing but has to be scrubbed again. So all this because the pan has to be scrubbed two or three times BECAUSE THEY CAN SEE THE STUFF THAT DOESN'T COME OFF.

I had the audacity to ask my 14 year old (I sometimes forget being 14, that all of my reasoning abilities disappeared for a few years - they came back sometime after the birth of my third child) if this meant that she wasn't washing the other pots thoroughly. The puzzled look led me further - if she couldn't see the gunk on the black pots, and there was still stuff on the glass pan after the first washing, how did she know that the pots were being properly cleaned? You'd have thought I'd grown two heads. OF COURSE the black pots are being washed properly. There's nothing left on them after they're cleaned. DUH.

Guess who washes the pots and pans now? I wish I could say she does, but I'm afraid I'm not that brave. Me.

Until I write again ...

Flea