My beloved husband and I have a highly scientific method for determining who gets to do the unwanted petty task of the moment. These petty tasks have in the past included:

• bathing the children
• before we had a working dishwasher appliance, hand washing the dirty dishes
• now that we do have an awesome dishwasher, hand washing the dirty dishes that don’t fit in the dishwasher
• getting out of the comfortable, warm bed to trudge over to the light switch by the door to turn off the bedroom light before going to bed
• getting out of the comfortable, warm bed on the Sunday morning to deal with the kids who’ve woken up and decided they now need attention
• taking daughter to the potty and reading to her Dora (the Explorer)’s Nursery Time Adventure for the three hundredth time

What is this systematic and foolproof method, you ask?

“Rock, Paper, Scissors“, naturally. We often limber up with some quick pre-showdown warm-up exercises, including shoulder rolls, warm-up jumps, hand dexterity exercises, and head rolls. We wouldn’t want to hinder our chances of victory by hampering our reflexes. Then when ready we square off and appraise each other cooly in the eye. Contestants’ hand is shown after the count of three. Rounds proceed until the first clear victor, no “best X out of Y” tournament.

For whatever reason we always seem to both choose Rock first. It almost seems like an amuse bouche round before we get to the real decision. Things do get heated though when more than one round goes by with us shooting the same hand. There was that epic showdown in late 2013 where we matched the same hand for 7 or 8 rounds. The tension and adrenaline just kept getting notched higher and higher with each passing round…until victory occurred, the tension was released, and the petty task of giving the kids a shower at grandma and grandpa’s house proceeded.

The funny thing is I don’t even remember who won that day. Perhaps I lost and that is why I’m suppressing that particular detail from memory. So that next time a petty task comes up I can face the challenge without the humiliating memory of defeat lingering in the background. :-p

But tonight…I think the girls can skip the bath tonight, right Honey?

~Jen