"Ryan needs to!"

Dan just called to say he's coming home an hour early tonight so he can go get our Washington license plates. Lest you think I'm a lazy homemaker, our last car died 2 years ago the night before I left for my parents' house for a week, so Dan bought our Pacifica while I was gone, so I'm not on the title and therefore not able to get the plates. I've been really frustrated lately by working hard to get the living room clean in the morning, then nobody seeing it before the kids mess it up again. So my plan was to wait until 5:00 to start straighening the living area. That's not going to work if Dan is on his way! So even though most of the mess is Katy-induced, I paused the show the boys were watching and asked them to clean up. And David whined a bunch that Ryan needed to help (Ryan left because he suddenly had to use the bathroom as soon as it was more fun than the activity at hand!). David's been doing that a lot lately. If I ask them both to do something, David spends so much more energy making sure that Ryan does it than he would on just doing the whole thing! It's really ridiculous. Seriously, it is more important to him that Ryan helps than that it gets done and he gets to watch the show. It's really irritating. Especially because this is the giant mess they don't want to clean up:


Since I've been typing they actually did get to it, and the show is back on. I guess they just needed to get some whining out of their system. Which is...pretty much...exactly...what I'm doing right now...