Wife In Training
I should know by now that jumping on my Nag-asawki and naaaaagging my husband is about as effective as offering him a punch in the face when I want something done, but I can't seem to help myself sometimes. I naaaaag. And naaaaag. And naaaaaag.
I think it was in our marriage vows that he has to put up with it. It was somewhere after that sickness and health bit but before the drunk uncle went all cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
He puts up with the nagging just fine. However, I am 110% certain that he survives by choosing to not hear me. Unless I throw the words beer or boobs into my sentence, he's completely deaf to my messages.
I'm pretty sure his ability to just not hear me when I nag is how he managed to go two years without really fixing a broken closet door in our house.
In his defense, he did once sort of fix it, but that sort of fix sort of only lasted a week or two. After that brief fling with a functional closet door, we went back to having a bi-fold door that wouldn't stay on the track. One of the top corners would dislodge itself pretty much constantly. That caused the bi-fold door to turn itself into a standard door and it would open up super wide, thereby blocking the most used hallway in our house.
It was really freakin' annoying, in no small part because when the door managed to drift all the way open, our dog Cody would lose his mind. He would stand and viciously bark at the door, as if it was Dora the Explorer. (What? You haven't trained your dog to attack Dora? You should.)
This morning I finally found a way to get my nagging about that door to result in action.
OK, so, technically Alexis was the one who finally found a way to get it fixed. All she had to do was to open the closet to grab her coat.
Oh, and she had to get attacked by the door. That probably helped.
I was sitting at the dining room table waiting for the school bus to come haul away the crazy child when she decided she needed a different coat than the one I had already pulled out. She went running over to the closet, pulled the little knob, and then tried her best to run away when the door started to fall on her. Unfortunately her attempt at a getaway ended up looking more like a Scooby Doo stand-in-one-place-while-running maneuver and less like the Roadrunner getting away from Wile E. Coyote. The closet door bounced off a wall and landed squarely on top of the poor kid.
The wall suffered FAR more damage than the kid, by the way. While the wall has a big gash in it now, Alexis was left with a nearly microscopic scratch on one of her thumbs. I'm sure it really did hurt, but it's truly nearly invisible to the naked eye. If I didn't have her to moan and groan in the general direction of the cut, I probably wouldn't be able to find it.
Once she was done freaking out that the house had attacked her, the kid was PISSED about the door falling on her. "You told daddy to fix that!" she declared OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
"Talk to daddy about it," was my only reply. I didn't need to coach the kid. I knew she would throw the book at him the minute she saw him.
And she did. She guilted that man like no small child has ever guilted a grown man before. He was her fiddle and she played beautiful, beautiful music.
The door was fixed ten minutes later.
You will never be able to convince me that nagging is a bad way to get your husband to do things around the house. If I hadn't nagged my husband over and over and over again, Alexis would have never learned how to jump on the Nag-asawki and get some results of her own.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Reader Comments (8)
haha!! Amazing! Glad Alexis is ok!
Glad she didn't really get hurt and wonderful that the door is finally fixed. Life works that way so often.
Your work here is done.
BOOBS
mental note: make sure FireGirl is in earshot whenever I ask hubby to do something
Great shot of the kid.
Glad she's ok and the door is fixed. I hope she continues to pick up the good training your sharing!
Nag is a four letter word to me. It's Ed's way of immediately discounting anything I say that he doesn't want to hear. And if I there is a task that he should have done years ago, but hasn't, then I could bitch about it 24 hours a day and it's not nagging - it's "wow - what an asshole you are." My kids have caught on, too, and they give him shit about doing stuff. It only works about 0.0001% of the time, though.