Ah, the good old days of dad sending me to the 7-11 with a note to buy him cigarettes. Hah! Try getting away with that sh*t nowadays, pops.

My Dad's line was "what do you think we had kids for? Now go (insert chore, laundry, dishes, lawn mowing) and don't come back till it's done."

Wow. We didn't have to do the store bit.

But, spring break did mean washing the walls. And, laundry, we hung that up.

Yardwork, we were called to duty for that.

But, otherwise, it was clean up after yourself. Wash what you use in the kitchen, clean up your mess, and, after you use the shower, clean it up for the next person.

Sort of military, I guess. There were a lot of us.

Oh, and there weren't remote controls back then. Just kids. :rolleyes:

Ya, I was the remote control. And on occasion the keeper of the antenna.

Ah the joy of being a human remote control. Standing next to the TV while my Dad "channel surfed". We also had to fetch him drinks, diet coke he didn't actually drink drink.

Pulling weeds sucked as did picking up the fruit that fell off the trees. We have a massive apricot tree and we'd have to pick up buckets and buckets of decaying apricots with ants crawling all through them. I hate even the smell of apricots.

Once my Mom asked Madz if she made her bed. Madz looked at her stunned. She literally had no idea what she was talking about. We use duvet covers so making the bed is just smoothing it out.

We had four pear treas, three apple trees, a walnut tree and two cherry trees in our yard but I don't really remember ever getting called to duty to pick up after them (though all the apples and walnuts did eventually get used as ad hoc baseballs and hit into the empty lot behind us).

Having almost 1 acre of lawn made being the designated lawn mower really suck.

The "please let my son here buy cigarettes for me" letter is a nice memory. If my parents had been drinkers I wonder if it would have worked for beer. Of course, it was the convenience store one block away and all the clerks knew us so I'm sure the note was just a formality. I wonder if they accepted them from people unknown.

I wasn't allowed to do laundry because my mom was convinced I'd ruin everything. Instead, I got bathroom duty. And I never did a good enough job for her. At that time, my mom was, as far as I can tell, completely insane and everything had to be totally like-new clean at all times. She hated the way I cleaned my room because I still had stuff out. And by stuff I mean: the book I was reading was on my desk and not put away in my bookcase every time I put it down; I had pens and pencils in a holder on my desk, instead of putting the whole holder in a drawer so that the desktop could be completely bare. As far as she was concerned, there should be nothing at all left on the horizontal surfaces. But then she went back to work finally, and once she started working in downtown Seattle and got a taste of reality she got much better, and now she leaves her knitting projects on the mantle instead of putting them in drawers out of sight.

Meanwhile, my laptop screen has spontaneously started working again. I'm sure it's possessed.

as the middle of 3 boys we each did duty as:

fruit tree picker
lawn mower
garage painter and cleaner
car washer
ivy hacker
roofer
fire break digger (for the canyon behind our house)

and as we got older and licensed to drive:
dump runners/loaders
sewer pipe digger upper (god I hated that particular job the worst)
parts chaser
auto mechanic
oil changer
tire changer
and one summer ( as punishment ) sand shoveler.

/sigh I wish I had me a kid sometimes....usually during any one of the above events.:evil:

Mowing the lawns sucked because we had three of them. And my mental Mother who was, and still is, convinced that power mowers don't work well. So we had the stupid manual kind which would jam every two feet. Also our house is on a hill so two lawns are in front and the other on a terrace at the basement level. So you also had the joy of hauling the thing up and down the stairs.

We have 3 kids and don't 'use' them. I like the 'You made the mess, you clean it up' way. But, it is hard to get them to work in the yard.

They way I do it is to show them that their father and I, regardless of how much we've worked/done/been sick {whatever} we still go out there and do it. That some chores are for the household.

Ha, I fix my bed the same way, katiesue. :snap:

My house may not be Martha Stewart clean but I wonder if my kids even appreciate the fact that I don't ride them all of the time about everything?

I could never live so clean. I look at my schtuff and think 'I should put it away'. But, it is my schtuff. I like to look at it. Pretty things, juvenile things {I have a Bobs' Big Boy, Jiminy Cricket, Pilsbury Dough Boy, Teddy Ruxpin, just to name a few things} and ooodles of books and pictures.

Where are these things supposed to go? Why bother having them?

{oh, was that a rant?}