so domesticated it’s scary

Ever since I started taking Ritalin, I’ve been a kitchen cleaning machine on Saturday mornings. I get up at 8 or so, pop in my 20mg of Ritalin, get dressed (shoes included!) and start cleaning my fingers to the bone. Nobody made me start doing it – I just did it a few weeks ago. And now I’m seriously in love with doing it. Once The General has downed the first cup or two of coffee, we kind of tag team the whole place, and usually some time before 11 a.m., our place is clean from front to back and we’re wondering what we’re going to do for the rest of the weekend.

Last weekend was the first time we had The Boy since we’d started doing this cleaning frenzy mornings and I think it kind of scared him. He ended up joining in thanks to a game I made up called “Pick a number between 1 and 3 and then you have to do the chore associated with it”, and getting things done like filling up all of our water bottles, taking out trash, sweeping all the floors, and cleaning his room (including making his bed!). And today, I couldn’t stop thinking of how we had to keep that going on a regular basis.

So, tonight, while The General was making dinner, the three of us set around the table and figured out how we were gonna spread our cleaning throughout the week instead of wasting the only free day I get with The Boy and the start of the weekend by doing a bunch of chores. Our plan involves a list of chores, with them all broken down into things that an 11 year old can do without any problem at all. It also involves drawing random chores from a yet to be appointed box/bowl/jar at least once a day to make sure we’re always working on cleaning instead of leaving it to Saturday morning.

This whole shebang is gonna start up tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes. I may need to find something else to put my Ritalin-induced focus on this weekend, which would not at all be a bad thing.