Beat me, kick me, write me bad checks. Just don't REPEAT yourself.

Coffee in the mornings with Huffpo. A few chapters of a good book before bed. Sunday Morning every Sunday morning. Kevin Charnas’ blog when I’m in a funk. Ritual, tradition, ceremony, repetition…whatever you wanna call it, I believe in it as much I believe in recycling shampoo bottles and changing my undergarments regularly. ENTHUSIASTICALLY, ya might say.

But not all repetition is created equal. For example, I LOATHE repetition of the autogenic, contradictory, mind-numbing verbal variety:

HEAD ON. Apply directly to the forehead. HEAD ON. Apply directly to the forehead. HEAD ON…

Stay the course… We will prevail… Stay the course… We will prevail.. Stay the course...

I LOVE YOU... I LOVE YOU... I LOVE YOU... I LOVE YOU... DID YOU HEAR ME, I SAID I LOVE YOU!!

But even more irksome than OTHER people's mind-numbing verbal repetition is MY OWN:

Pick up that towel, please. Pick up that towel, please. PICK UP THAT WET TOWEL BECAUSE IF I HAVE TO DO IT, THERE WILL BE A SEETHING INFERNO OF HELLFIRE TO PAY!!!

So to alleviate some of my broken-record loathing, (SOME, because I still have to repeat myself to the babies of the house... Let's go potty. You need to go potty? HEY, how about Emma sits on the potty!), I came up with this ingenious (complicated?) game (point system?). Every time my children do a necessary task before I have to TELL them to do said task, they get a given amount of points. We have a white board where we keep a tally of the points. They start the week off by making an end-of-the-week goal, like, a pizza party, and then I assign the pizza party a point price, like maybe 45 points. Then they work like dogs all week long to meet their goal. OR not. So far, it’s working with Antonia, the oldest. Not so much with Jonah, the second-oldest. True to his age/sex/sibling lineup order, Jonah’s more of an instant-gratification kinda guy. A YAY JONAH!! just after he throws the trash is worth more to him than a quarter for the same task at the end of the week. Antonia, on the other hand, wants me to show her the money. She carries around a notepad and writes down all her spontaneous, NON-gratuitous accomplishments:

1. Took Emma’s shoes off for her.
2. Cleared the dining room table.
3. Turned off the kitchen light.
4. Picked a crumb off the floor and threw it in the trash.
   
   

Then she hands it to me to review and comment, saying, “So what’s this worth so far… 20 points??”

I’ve been trying this out for a while now, trying to mold and perfect it into a win-win situation. ANYTHING to keep the doublemommyspeak under control. Meanwhile, Antonia is trying to come up with new and improved ways to earn her points.

“What else can I put on my list?” she asks while we were driving to school yesterday. “What else? Mommy, think. What else?”

“There’s a billion and one things a person can do,” I say.

“Yeah,” Jonah adds. “You could pee in a bush. Or wide a twactuh. Or paint a pickchuh… Or put a sock in it!”

Now, in all my parenting experience, I have NEVER told my children to put a sock in anything except their underwear drawer, not even when it was the only logical thing to say. I concluded that Jonah was being literal and so I asked, “Put a sock in what, Jo?”

He shrugged his shoulders and in a tone barely audible to my finely-tuned mother ears, he said, “I don’t know…Huh mouth, I guess.”

I don’t know where he learned that phrase. His sister? A friend at school? Ed, Edd and Eddy? I didn’t address it like I probably should have. Bad, bad, mommy. I know. But I was too busy wondering when he started hating verbal repetition as much as I do. I'll tell you when it WASN'T -- yesterday morning when I implored him to pick up that wet towel.