What's working for us....

If you are here for ICLW - Welcome - my story is here.

As you might remember I whined to all of you last month about the hubby not helping me out enough around the house. It wasn't pretty. I got heated quite a few times about it after that. Then somewhere along the way things fell into place for us. We started to figure out a system that's working - for us.

The first part that probably made a difference is that I am OBVIOUSLY pregnant now. Joey is a visual person and I think when the belly made its grand I'm not going away appearance it triggered something in his head. The bigger part of the equation was changing my way of thinking. I am my mother's child which makes me somewhat of a neat freak. I use to have my clothing organized my style and color in my closet with different hangers for each. Being a neat freak doesn't work when you are pregnant and married with a house full of pets. I let the clutter buildup over the week now. THE WORLD ISN'T GOING TO END just because there are four pairs of shoes hanging out in the living room.

I learned to speak up too. If I come home and I am too tired to cook dinner - I tell Joey. He is usually more than happy to cook dinner instead. Yes the kitchen may be a mess afterward but the dishes are not going to walk off in the middle of the night and stage a strike just because no one washed them immediately. In fact they are always still waiting for me at the end of the next day. I also learned to split up my tasks. One day I might do laundry, another I'll wash dishes or sweep. I can digest small bites of house work.

The biggest part of the equation though was learning to let Joey do it his way too. Take Sunday morning for instance. Jellybean woke me up at 6:30am to let me know we were 10 seconds away from peeing the bed and after that I couldn't fall back asleep. In fact, I was laying in bed thinking of how the second bathroom really needed a good scrub down. So I woke up and started some crazy nesting. In 4 hours time I did as many loads of laundry, swept, mopped, washed dishes, dusted (including the tops of the kitchen cabinets and all the knick knacks) cleaned the bunny cage, organized all of Joey's tattoo desk and scrubbed that entire bathroom down including wiping the walls down with the magic eraser.

Sundays though are usually my day for going and hanging out with my parents so when 10:30 rolled around I knew I needed to wrap it up. Joey was still in bed snoozing away. Sunday is my day for letting him sleep in. He wakes up for work at 4:30 five days a week so he deserves to have a day where he can be lazy. Just because I am up bright and early it doesn't mean he needs to follow suit. So instead of storming in there and starting to bitch at him for still being in bed and look at everything I did already (which I use to do) I leave him a note with the things I didn't get to. So yesterday's list had these chores for him -

-vacuum (including behind the couch since I dusted)
-clean our bathroom
-strip the bed (I couldn't do it with him in it!)
-put away the dishes
-clean his son's room (he let the neighbor's kids come over and play and they left it a hot mess)
- make dinner

So I left him the note, snuck a kiss in and headed over to see my rents. I didn't call and bug him to see what time he woke up or nag to see if he was taking care of my honey do list. A 32 year old man doesn't need me babysitting him. Instead I have learned to trust that he will take care of it because he loves me.

And of course he did what I asked and more.

I think most of the changing had to do with me and not him. He is more open to helping me and being my partner when I started showing him that I trusted him and stopped nagging and harping on him. I realized that he rarely did that to me and that the more respect we show for each other the better we get along. Just because he doesn't do things on my schedule or the way I would doesn't mean its wrong. Just different.

Besides who can argue when your house looks this good from the work you did together?

And yes - he made Fried Green Tomatoes all by himself and they were delicious!