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Avalux Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 04:49 PM
Original message
* Made my Daughter Clean Her Room
So it's about 8 oclock last night, after 3 hours or so of fighting with my 8 year old to clean up her room, I was at my wits end. There she sat on the floor amidst a pile of toys, clothes and books, decompensating pretty quickly. She was crying and whining about how hard it was to put everything away; I knew we were almost past the point of no return.
Instead of yelling at her - I remembered something. I remembered an SNL skit of * and Kerry's debate - * kept saying "but it's hard work" over and over. My daughter had watched that with me and for weeks afterward walked around doing a really good imitiation.
Anyway - instead of yelling - I said "you sound like George Bush - it's hard work (in my best southern twang), you don't want to be like him do you?"
Those words were like magic. Her mood changed immediately and she started laughing and imitating him with me. We were both laughing. Then she said "no, I don't want to be like him" and started putting things away. She was done in about 30 minutes.

Amazing, huh?
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MadAsHellNewYorker Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 04:52 PM
Response to Original message
1. Now thats raisn' a child right!
good job! :yourock: as does your little girl
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Avalux Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 04:53 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. thanks!
it was pretty cool! :hi:
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BlueJazz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 04:52 PM
Response to Original message
2. That's probably the only time in the history of the world that......
George Bush had anything to do with something creative, cool or nice. :)
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ewagner Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 04:53 PM
Response to Original message
4. Parenting
....it's hard, ya know? It's hard work! :evilgrin:
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Wickerman Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 04:54 PM
Response to Original message
5. lol
that is hilarious! That's one smart kid ya got there.

Think it would work for an older kid?
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Avalux Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 04:56 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. nah
I think an older kid would just roll her eyes and make a face - bribery works well with them. :evilgrin:
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liberalitch Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 05:18 PM
Response to Reply #5
11. I'm 40, I'm going home right now to clean my room
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cally Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 04:57 PM
Response to Original message
7. You made my day
sometimes the weirdest things work.

It's hard work!!! :-)
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Avalux Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 05:03 PM
Response to Reply #7
8. good!
I wanted to share - just in case anyone else wants to try it. :hi:
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Rabrrrrrr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 05:06 PM
Response to Original message
9. LOL! What a great and wonderful way to get her to clean up!
Edited on Thu Feb-17-05 05:07 PM by Rabrrrrrr
No yelling, all smiles, and you got to insult that war criminal asshole shitwad at the same time!

BRAVO!

I might need to use that tactic on myself. That might inspire me to do the filing I need to do, and empty out some more boxes and clean up.

:-)
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CubsFan1982 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 05:16 PM
Response to Original message
10. Maybe if * had been President when I was a kid...
My mom wouldn't have had so much trouble getting me to do my chores! :D
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Lisa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 05:21 PM
Response to Original message
12. this is wonderful!
I confess that I can be a bit of a slob (especially when things are very busy at work and I bring piles of documents home with me) -- but reading this stuff about * always makes me want to put things away and vacuum the place!

http://www.vegsource.com/talk/flame1/messages/256.html

"Bush left a house he’d rented in Montgomery trashed – the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News reported in February. “He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions,” Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid."


http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040927&s=baker

"The family that rented Bush a house in Montgomery, Alabama, during that period told me that Bush did extensive, inexplicable damage to their property, including smashing a chandelier, and that they unsuccessfully billed him twice for the damage--which amounted to approximately $900, a considerable sum in 1972. Two unconnected close friends and acquaintances of a well-known Montgomery socialite, now deceased, told me that the socialite in question told them that he and Bush had been partying that evening at the Montgomery Country Club, combining drinking with use of illicit drugs, and that Bush, complaining about the brightness, had climbed on a table and smashed the chandelier when the duo stopped at his home briefly so Bush could change clothes before they headed out again."


http://www.ariannaonline.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-12401.html

"One day in the late fall of 1972, James Pryor Smith walked into the roomy two-bedroom house that belonged to his aunt, Elizabeth Dickerson, an elderly woman who was confined to a nursing home, and he could hardly believe his eyes. Located in the heart of Cloverdale - an exclusive, old-money neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama - the house, his son Neil remembers now, "was a total wreck." A chandelier was badly damaged, there were holes in the wall and the place was full of empty liquor bottles. "The cleaning bill alone was $900," Neil Smith says, "which was no small thing in 1972." One detail about the mess stood out. "The bedding had to be hauled out into the street," says Jackson Stell, a friend of Pryor Smith. "Pryor said there must have been no sheets on the bed, the mattress was so horribly soiled."
"The trash and damage clearly came from drunken partying," says Mary Smith, who was married to Pryor at the time. "Pryor was very specific that this was related to booze."

Pryor Smith was livid. He had rented out his aunt's house in May as a favor to a family friend who knew Winton "Red" Blount, a construction magnate who became one the richest men in Alabama before being appointed postmaster general by President Nixon. The twenty-six-year-old tenant - his name was George W. Bush - had sounded like a reliable young man. He was a Yale graduate who came from a good family. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, had been a United States senator from Connecticut. His father, George H.W. Bush, was a former congressman from Houston who had gotten rich in the Texas oil business. Young Bush was coming to Montgomery to serve as the state organizational director of Blount's United States Senate campaign. After Pryor Smith had the house cleaned and repaired, he sent a bill to Bush - twice. Bush never responded."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072999.htm

"He lived in a cluttered bachelor apartment above a cinder-block garage, his bed held together by one of his ratty ties."

"Bush hadn't been ready to settle down – but neither was he considered any kind of ladies' man. In fact, his friends saw him as a bit of a reclamation case, a tad eccentric and a slob. The wives of his friends took pity on him and did his laundry."


I admit that my place is cluttered (partly due to the lack of storage space) BUT I don't leave half-eaten food lying around the way he did.







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Avalux Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 05:22 PM
Response to Reply #12
14. OMG -
I had never read that stuff before. Thanks!! :hi:
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fit4life Donating Member (561 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-17-05 05:21 PM
Response to Original message
13. I have an even easier way.
I tell my kids to clean their room. I give them about 10 minutes to get moving, and if they haven't I walk back in the room with a trash bag and start tossing anything that's not where it's supposed to be in the bag. I did it a couple of times, and now they know to get their asses in gear as soon as I tell them to or they're going to lose some stuff.

It works on my 14 year old soon-to-be-stepson too. All I had to do was walk in the room, unplug the tv and haul it out. By the time I started unhooking the stereo he got around to asking me what I was doing. I told him that I wasn't going to leave expensive stuff like that in a room with someone who didn't care enough to take care of it. He got the idea real quick too.
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