Lima Beans & Peach Cobbler

This use to be a very popular phrase. Well, probably not anywhere else but my home when I was in Jr. & High school. Amanda will know what I am talking about here. We use to have a stepfather who was a jerk. You know the stereo-typical stepfather that is in the movies who are mean to their wife's children? I think those stereotypes were actually based off of this man. When he would get mad at me, he would take the family to eat at restaurants but make me stay in the car while they ate inside. Or he would take my brother and sister shopping for shoes or clothes but make me stay home by myself while they went out. My brother has a slight learning disability from when he almost drowned when he was about 6 or 7 and didn't get oxygen to his brain for about 2 minutes. In jr. high when my brother was having a hard time reading his school books or homework, said step-father would yell at my brother telling him that he was stupid, dumb, or a fuck up. I moved to El Paso with my aunt for a while in my Junior year in high school because he hit me. When I came home one time during Christmas he made my mom take me to work with her where I would have to sit inside her car for her 12-hour shift. I am pretty sure that most of my issues with men stem from him. Anyway, the whole point is that he always had some whacked out catch phrase he would be continuously spitting out. He had many. For example: "You danced the dance, now it's time to play the fiddle" or "You're going to Midland because you're lying". Can anyone figure those out? I never did. Well, another one of his phrases was "You have to eat your lima beans before you can have your peach cobbler." Which, the way I understood it to be, means that we had to do the stuff we dont like (like homework, chores, etc) before we could do something we like (like talking on the phone or watching t.v.). This is one of the times that what he was trying to say actually made sense.

So, anyway, all that to say I want to start having this kind of mentality with organizing things in my life. My laundry usually piles up until I don't have any surface in my kitchen to put anything on. Now I dont really mind doing the actual laundry, I just hate putting it away. So for weeks my kids and I will get our clothes in the morning from the kitchen to get dressed. Anyway! I am going to start bribing myself to get my chores done. I can't read or watch a movie until I put away my clothes or wash the dishes or vaccummed or etc. Why am I blogging about this? No clue. Maybe to make it more tangible or for accountability reasons.