I feel like life is just zooming by. Sometimes at the end of the day when my husband asks me what I did during the day, I draw a blank. It's not that I didn't do anything. It just passed so quickly that I can't remember.

Usually I have vacuumed but by the end of the day there are crumbs and bits of paper everywhere.

After spending an hour doing the dishes and getting the kitchen sparkling, there are 2 meals and an afternoon's worth of dishes stacked up like sky-scrapers.

If I've dusted, it doesn't matter. That is a forgotten chore. Nobody but me notices that. Well, me and one of my little piano students that likes to point out when my piano is dirty.

Forget about getting anyone to notice when the bathroom is clean.

I feel like I'm wasting valuable time cleaning, but if I were to stop doing it, the place would be unlivable.

I recently decided that it was high time to cut back on the drudgery and free up some time for something that I actually want to do.

I decided to start making the older girls do their own laundry. It all started one night in family home evening when we, as parents, were taking the opportunity to express, in a loving way, that we were tired of the kids always asking their siblings to things for them that they were perfectly capable of doing themselves (ie; getting them a drink/snack, fetching the remote/ipod/computer, taking their laundry upstairs with them, etc.) It was becoming an epidemic.

Curtis pointed out to them that sometimes we, the parents, ask them to do things for us because we need their help in that moment, not because we are lazy. And they should not confuse helping out the family with household chores with us just wanting to give them something to do.

Hannah decided to pipe up in that moment, "Sometimes mom asks us to do so much and she just doesn't realize how tired we are."

Oh no, she didn't!!!

I wasn't feeling very "loving" at this point. There have been so many instances in the past that Curtis has said to me, "The girls need to do more around the house," to which I almost always reply, "They work so hard on their schoolwork. They get up so early for seminary. The least I can do for them is make sure their laundry is done. At least I thought I was doing them a service.

My eyes have been opened ladies. I'm doing them no favors. So, I announced that I would no longer be providing this free service anymore and they were to do their own laundry, and only on the weekends when the electricity rate is cheaper, so they must budget out the their clothing wisely.

I also informed them that if they repeatedly washed clothes that had not been worn but accidentally were put in the dirty clothes due to negligently not putting them away in the first place, they were going to forfeit their allowance for that month. You know--to help pay for the extra electricity, water, and laundry soap that they had used.

It was a shock to them at first, but they soon got used to the idea. And only one daughter has forfeited her allowance. They can be taught!

And me? It has been wonderful! I no longer have towering piles of laundry all over the place all week long.

You should try it.