Sometimes Life is a Drudge

The kids had off from school on Election Day earlier this week. We ran our last fundraising activity for Cub Scouts that day at the polling station. Since we’re selling product, popcorn to be precise, and I’m the Cubmaster I had to be on call to support whoever was selling at the time. Mostly, that means bringing more popcorn for them to sell, but I also might have to help out with change or something similarly exciting.

Since I was going to be somewhat occupied by that activity, and the plan was to take the boy to sell for an hour during the afternoon, we decided to let the lass go see a friend for half the day. I dropped her off early in the morning and that left the boy with me.

So what did we do? In a word: chores.

More specifically, I did some grocery shopping and continued with doing cleanup from Sandy. The large tree that we took down in the early hours of the storm still needed to be chopped and the wood that I had chopped needed to be stacked. Also, there was more wood in the back to clear or harvest for firewood. So the bulk of the time was spent doing that.

The boy was disappointed.

I’d asked him to come outside and help me with stacking the wood, since it had to be carried across the yard to get it to it’s resting place for seasoning. I figured with a little help we could complete the project quicker. Well, I’d have been right if I’d received a “little” help. The boy did pick up a few pieces and stack them. But for the most part, he whined about the fact that it was boring work and wanted to know if this was all the we were going to do.

I wasn’t in a mood to humor him or try to make the work seem more glamorous than it was. The fact is, he was right- the work is boring. But then, that’s life. It’s meals, laundry, pickup the kids, drive the kids, mow the lawn, chop the wood. For the Wife, it’s go to work, laundry and all the rest. Why bother putting lipstick on a pig?

So I told him that sometimes there’s work that needs to be done and it isn’t fun or glamorous, like vacuuming or dusting, but it needs to be done and it’s best to just get to it. Further, I explained that most of life would be like that, even after he had a job someday. He’d go to work and, if he was lucky, some of the work would be interesting. But for the most part, there’d be things he’d have to do that wouldn’t be as much fun, or interesting. But he’d still have to do it. Finally, I told him that’s why you can have fun later, because you get the boring stuff done.

I don’t know that he’s too young to understand that, but he’s definitely too young to accept it. When his sister came home and told of all the fun stuff she did with her friend, he told her flatly “We worked the whole time.”

I wonder if this isn’t a fault in parenting now-a-days. We spend so much time as parents trying to find ways to entertain the kids: here’s a DS, here’s a portable DVD player, here’s an iPod, here’s a word search book, here’s some other thing to hold your attention for 5 seconds. Then, when it comes time to actually do something productive and necessary, they aren’t prepared for it because it doesn’t beep, bloop, blow-up, or entertain in some way. It’s just them and a rake or some wood or the vacuum and how boring is that? Perhaps more time should be spent on basic chores so that, while they don’t necessarily like them, they at least are part of their routine. And with that, they learn by doing that boring stuff can be done and then they can have their fun afterwards.