I'm a great parent

I'm a great parent.

At least in my head.

In the eyes of the kids, I'm the worst parent.  Compared to other parents, I think I'm in the 50th percentile.  My latest endeavor was a program to teach Scott to clean up his clothes from off the bathroom floor.

Sometimes I throw them in his bed.  Once I put them in his backpack so he took them to school.  I was hoping that he'd open up his backpack, see his dirty choners and be so embarrassed that he'd never leave them on the ground again.  But that failed.

This time I told him that if he didn't pick them up that I'd hide them.  He shrugged and said he didn't care.  So I hid them.  After two days he started asking where his clothes were, and he had apparently missed the laundry cut-off.  I told him he could buy back his clothes for a dollar each.  I wanted him to feel the pain of losing money to a lame cause but he said, "I have a lot of money and I have a lot more coming to me."  Wow.  I know his tooth fairy and I know the other sources of income he has, and I was taken off guard at his confidence in his own wealth.

He showed me some of his twenties and I said something to the effect of, "If you keep leaving your clothes out you won't have any more money."  I'm sure Heidi would disagree about this strategy but I'm humble enough to know that some of my kid-raising strategies have been failures.  But I also know that you can't try the same failure again and hope for a different outcome.  Albert Einstein said that is the definition of insanity.  Plus, Thomas Edison had thousands of failures before he got the light bulb to work right and he said, "I just learned a thousand ways that it didn't work."

By the time I get this all figured out, the kids will be out of the home and have kids of their own.  Then I can sit back and chuckle.  I'll be like, "Got any twinkies, Margaret?"

The end.