Why Me?

Our Avery Jane is a unique little girl -- two parts iron will and sass, one part sweetness and sensitivity. She outweighs her older sister by a good 5 or 10 pounds and will undoubtedly be noticeably taller than her soon. She loves superheroes, watching movies, and spanking her dad on the butt when he isn't looking. Among her other quirks, Avery is almost monumentally opposed to doing work of any kind. She hates work and puts more effort and sweat into complaining about being asked to do something than she actually puts into doing much of anything. I'm not saying she's lazy because she's not. She just feels that making her bed, picking up her toys, helping around the house, etc. are just not for her. She's a very hard worker when she wants to be -- but it darn well had better be at something that she wants to do.

Case in point: after dinner yesterday (the very tasty Korean pork and beans prepared by the very tasty Suzanne), I was washing dishes because we were momentarily out (okay, we'd been out for three days because I didn't go shopping when I should have) of dish detergent. While I was about to clean a mountain of dishes, I asked Avery if she could pick up her placemat and shake it out.

Avery: "Why do I have to do it?! I don't want to do it!"

This is her response to almost anything she's asked to do -- picking up a magnet set she left spread all over the floor, putting forks on the dinner table, getting up in the morning for school, etc. Pretty much whatever she's asked to do triggers a deep, profound questioning in her perfectly round head that centers around the important question of "Why me?"

Seriously, she regularly acts like she's a waif in a Dickens novel and she spends her day working her fingers to the bone making shoe polish or something.

But here's the thing. Avery is complicated. As I said, it isn't that she's lazy. She's just very particular about how she spends her time. I forget this sometimes and think of her as a little slug. Really, she's just very task and accomplishment oriented. She doesn't want to bring me the tv control from across the room because 1. she figures I can do it myself (which I can but why should I when I have little, four-foot tall slaves to do my bidding?) and 2. there's no real task or cool result involved.

Avery loves to help in the kitchen and whenever she sees me or Suzanne cutting something she immediately offers to break out her "safety knife" and help out with making the salad or whatever.

She is my regular helper when I make cookies or brownies or homemade noodles for soup. She digs actually doing something and being able to see the results and say to others, "I helped do that."

I was reminded of this last night when she refused to shake out her placemat because "Why am I the only one asked to do two things? You're only doing one thing. I don't want to do two things." (She had already brought her plate to the sink and, to her mind, that was quite enough.)

I pointed out that I was washing the entire family's dishes and asked would she like to trade jobs? I'd shake out the placemat and she could do all the dishes?

She immediately said, "Yes."

So, for your viewing pleasure, I now present the photo essay entitled: The Hardest Working Lazy Girl In the World.








I did the bigger pots and the silverware but, otherwise, everything you see in this last photo was hand washed by the steely, powerful AJB (with supervision, of course.)