Ha! I bet now you are thinking this is about sex. Which it really isn’t. (Though that might be a good reason for a clean kitchen floor. Oooops.)
Being a stay at home mom and wife, I don’t really have my own income. I’m still the shopping authority in the family and we discuss all big purchases, but still, there’s no employer depositing a nice (or decent, or even pathetic) check once a week (or once a month, for us Europeans).
A girl likes to have pocket money. Money we can do whatever we want with, be it save for a designer bag (what I have been meaning to do) or buying too many pairs of shoes and pay for blog hosting and a domain (what I have actually been doing).
I don’t want you to think I am some pathetic, mistreated creature: I have all I need (though perhaps not all I want, but that’s a whole other story), a bank card and an acceptable… shall we call it allowance? (Just don’t go all feminist pride on me, ok?) But nothing that brings me close to shopping freedom, really.
So my husband, brilliant mind that he is, decided to dangle that big carrot in front of my nose. No, not that. (Enough with that, already!) More money. And what better way to do that, but play my game? He actually must have channeled his neurotic wife (ehm – me) and come up with a checklist that a semi-obsessed list-maker (me again) would find acceptable. A checklist!! This is what 12 years married to me will do to a guy.
The checklist included household chores as well as parenting duties I normally do anyway, because he wanted to be fair and he realizes, he said, that there’s more to my day than cleaning and tidying up. Really, love? So those (few, very few) times I went out on my own and you took care of the girls start paying off then. Seriously, no better way to put an end to the much-despised “What did you do today?” that makes you want to strangle your beloved with the first thing on hand (which considering the usual state of my house could be anything from a purple scarf to the string of a half-deflated helium balloon) than leaving said beloved a few times alone with the progeny. Seriously, works like a charm. You come back all refreshed from a night out, in a good mood still from the laughs and the chats, and possibly a little tipsy from the drinks, and you find him bone tired, possibly sporting dark circles and ready to hand the kidlets back over, having realized that being a “hands-on dad” wasn’t even half of it.
But I digress. Excuse me while I wipe that smug grin off my face.
So he decided to play it my way, and he offered me a higher… ok, I am still not sure about the term allowance, should we say salary? Ok, salary. He offered me a raise, so to speak, because using his checklist I would likely still get the original amount if I only did what I already do (which isn’t much as far as cleaning goes), but I could get 4 times as much if all the points were checked off. It worked. I did a quick calculation in my head and upon realizing that I could afford to get my favorite bag after a mere 6 weeks of doing the checklist, I shook his hand and said “deal”.
Of course in real life things are quite different. After a few weeks following the checklist fairly faithfully, with mixed results, I almost gave up completely, and as a result I am currently fairly broke. But as it turns out, the pressure from the move comes in handy: with countless people getting ready to tour the house for various reasons, and with only 2 months left for me to get some much-needed (or at least much-wanted) accessories without paying customs and huge shipping charges, I’m ready to tackle the checklist with renewed enthusiasm.
Ok, that might be stretching it a bit, let’s say I’m ready to grit my teeth and bear the household chores. And when my motivation falters, these are the images that will inspire me and bring me new energy:
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I know, I’m SUCH a girl. *sticks tongue out* Bite me.
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