The many labors

Of all the labors of Hercules, none was as daunting as the brutal tasks I routinely put my children through, in particular the one in which I burden them with – brace yourself – taking something up to their rooms.
My kids have this amazing ability to shed things when they enter a room – clothes, shoes, toys, live animals. They simply walk through a room and it immediately looks like a small tornado zoomed through a kids’ consignment store.
Often, I take this approach to cleaning: I wait until they are fast asleep and clean the house, enjoying the cleanliness that will last until approximately eight seconds after they wake up, at which point they begin shedding again.
But, on occasion, they do have to help pick up. And the amount of energy they expend trying to avoid the task at hand is easily 8 billion times the amount of energy it would take to actually do the chore. A prime example for this is the couch cushions. Couch cushions, as their name would suggest, belong on a couch. No, no, no. Not in my house. They are designed to be rocks on the lava. Or walls. Or toadstools. Pretty much anything BUT couch cushions. That’s fine, because kids should be able to have fun and use their imagination. But there are times when the lava rocks need to be transformed back into cushions. And then we have this delightful back and forth:
ME: OK, put the cushions back on the couch.
CHILD: But it’s our rock/wall/toadstool!!!
ME: Yeah, but we’ve got company coming over, and the cushions need to be put back on the couch.
CHILD: (lying on the cushionless couch, arms flailing backward) Nooooooo!!!!!!
ME: Very dramatic. Now put the cushions on the couch.
CHILD: It’s too haaaaaard!!!!
That’s one of their favorites: It’s amazing how difficult certain things become for my children. They can construct a mini-Bastille out of couch cushions but will claim it is too complicated to reverse engineer that into their original function.
Eventually, we will come to a resolution, usually one involving me saying, “THE CUSHIONS GO ON THE COUCH OR I GET RID OF A PET!!!”
Same thing happens with clothes that need to be taken to appropriate rooms. A while back, I was getting ready to take the kids to see a movie, which I think is a pretty darn swell dad thing to do and thereby something certainly worth the effort of a minor task or two. As we were heading out the door, I noticed that both of the kids had several items of clothes on the floor, which, to them, is practically the same as the clothes being folded and put in a dresser.
This is what I said: “Before we go, you both need to run those clothes up to your room.”
Based on their reaction, this is what I said, “Before we go, both of you must lift the van over your head.”
After about 30 seconds of resistance, I asked them the question I always ask, “You do realize that had you just done it when I asked, you’d be done, right?” That, of course, is not true, because what I asked them to do is the most difficult burden ever put upon a child.
In all fairness, they will go through spurts of helpfulness (read: they can be bribed). When their motivation is ramped up, they will do a serviceable job of helping out. I am sure this will continue to improve as they get older, and one day, they can pass down this knowledge of orderliness to their children. Or they can threaten to get rid of a pet.