A Break From Homework

'Lil Lizzy can't win for losing. We want her to help her sisters clean their shared room, but a) she drags her feet and b) they don't want her in there; they want to play Big Kid Games while they clean, and they kick her out. Not a problem with just Abby and Lizzy, or just Leanna and Lizzy, but all three of them (all three of any kids where Lizzy is involved actually; it happens when Abby has friends over, although it's less directly kicking her out of her own room) gets very two against one, with Lizzy odd kid out because of the age difference

And the chore list (which she does generally follow, albeit with whining) kind of went by the wayside while the kids were out of town in mid-August. That'll start up again tomorrow; not fair to Leanna to make her clean up stuff that happened when she wasn't even here. Even if she and Abby both complain that Lizzy never has to do anything, but then set her up to fail. They can't help it; they're adolescent and pre-adolescent, respectively. Anyway, when we move in November or December, Lizzy'll have her own room and it'll cease to be a problem.

But today it required a little judicious tweaking, to preserve the dignity of two older kids (13 and nearly 11 respectively) who are underslept and resisting basics like showering and tidying their room, while still requiring Lizzy to do some cleaning in the room where her sisters don't want her to be. I had her crawl under the bed and clean underneath it (that way when Leanna goes back to her mom's tomorrow morning it'll be just a matter of her shoving the trundle in; when she leaves in morning-time things tend not to get cleaned up unless we do it the day before). So I had Lizzy get all the stuffed toys and books out of there, so she did a job, then dragged her out here to play old SNES games (apparently Mystic Quest is too much reading as of yet (and I can't read it to her while doing homework) but she's enjoying Super Mario World though she's not very good at it yet). 

So the big girls finally come out after tidying their room and Lizzy is only too happy to let them have the controller, because they're far better at this kind of game than she is, and I'm relieved because it gets her out of my hair while I do my homework (a lot less, "Mommy, can you do this level for me?" And I can; I used to sell these things and demonstrate them for a living after all). The hubs tries, really hard, but the kids want me to do this stuff, not Daddy. Especially Liz.

Now, thank goodness, back to homework.