I was talking to my friend Amy the other day and she asked about my kids.

The conversation began with the average, run-of-the-mill, “They’re good.” and somehow turned into a competition of whose kids are lazier.

Spoiler alert: Mine are. They’re lazy as shit.

Wait, let me back up. My oldest and youngest are lazy as shit. My middle, plays the typical middle-child role and is the peace-maker. He’d rather do allll the chores than have any strife between his brothers. He’s also my favorite. I say this with zero guilt.

The other 2… lazy as shit.

It’s weird though, they’re not lazy in the traditional sense – ie. sit there and do nothing all the time. It’s more like a “IT’S NOT MY TURN!!” thing. Like they’re being forced to do something terribly unfair and they have to go all Beastie Boys and fight for their rights.

Meanwhile, we barely make them do any chores.

They can thank me and my obsessive need for cleanliness and order for this, because:

1. I know they’ll never meet my standards and I’ll redo it anyway.

And

2. I don’t need the headache of hearing them argue over ‘who did it last time.’

So just to give them some sort of responsibility, we assign them the most basic, not even real, chores.

The worst one, the one that makes me want to strangle them each and every night, is the shaking out of the table cloth.

The chore is all in the name: They have to take the table cloth off the table, bring it outside, and shake the crumbs off it. That’s it.

I don’t even make them fold it and put it back in the drawer. They just have to ball it up and leave it on the stairs.

This is because not a day goes by that the slobs don’t get sauce, or ketchup, or syrup, or jelly, or gum, or honey, or glue, or blood, or pine tar, or silly putty, or mud, or kerosene, or bees wax, or W-D 40, or epoxy, or any other sticky substance you can imagine on the tablecloth.

Then, inevitably, come the crumbs.

We could have a meal consisting of nothing but broth and they will find a way to make crumbs.

I have to wash the tablecloth every single time we use it because they are disgusting.

So yep, that’s all they have to do and they actually fight over this.

Last night, since I’d just had this conversation with Amy, I decided to text her in real time so she’d see I wasn’t exaggerating.

Her response to the photo of my kids fighting in the stairwell over who was going to do this sweatshop-type chore was:

Overheard after getting home… Quote from one child to another, “to whomever ate chicken noodle soup in the shower, come get it, I want to take a shower”

1- why does he eat in the tub, let alone the bathroom (🤮)
2- soup??????
Omg, I can not leave these people unsupervised (my husband was home)

My kids may have won the lazy as shit competition, but soup in the shower??? I don’t even know what category that falls into! <shivers up and down spine>

Poor Amy.