It’s one thing when my mom reminds and nags at me to clean my room or do my house chores, but it’s a totally different thing when I think of it all by my very own self. That’s when I really get a kick of doing it. The other day I got this totally bright idea! You see, we get a little pocket money every time we do a little job around the house, not counting dishes and setting the table of course. But things like sweeping the stairs, the garage, cleaning the toilets, dusting the surfaces, that sort of thing. So we have this chart with the payments of each job. Brother does quite a bit of them because he gets to the jobs first and does all the easier ones. Though I prefer to do one bigger job and get a little more for it in one go. I guess both work and we sort of end up with the same at the end of the week, which is when we get paid.
I think Dad and Mom wanted us to experience what it will be like when we get older. We have to work hard and do a good job if want any pay. Being slack and lazy doesn’t really get us anywhere or anything. Oh yes! I was going to tell you my bright idea. Well, at least my friend and I thought it was. We had the chart in front of us while my friend and I ate breakfast. Oops, I forgot to tell you that she had a sleep over at my place since we really wanted to see each other and also she lives kind of far. But were we glad for that. So the chart, yes! She asked me what it was for and so I explained it to her. And together, in one go, we both yelled out, “Let’s make some money!!!” with bright eyes and a smile beaming across our faces.
It was a very hot day and we did feel like getting an ice-cream. But I didn’t want to use up my pocket money for that. I usually prefer using it on something that keeps a little longer than a snack that is over in a few minutes. So we found all the jobs that weren’t done that we could do. We started with the most expensive ones and then worked our way through the list on all the ones we felt we could manage. We felt exhausted after, but it was even kind of fun. Sure beats doing the jobs alone. Plus we had a real cool (literally “cool”) incentive. We could finally enjoy our delicious cold ice-cream! Yes, the money was gone right away, yes the snack was gone quickly too (for fear of melting), but you can imagine the satisfaction of a clean house that WE had helped to clean and it also kept us from experiencing that awful thing called “boredom”.