A Teaching Mom vs a Non-teaching Mom

I have this book in my bookshelf that is all about raising independent children. It is a great book and it gives great ideas on different responsibilities that you could give your children at certain ages. When I first got this book, I only had two children, and they were very young. I had all of these great intentions on raising these amazing independent girls that could balance the budget by the age of 8 (just kidding, but you get the idea). The older my girls have gotten, the more my expectations seem to dwindle. Instead, I think I'll be happy with them being able to manage the small amounts of money they earn, pay tithing on it, and save or spend the rest. When it comes to teaching children how to cook, clean, manage money, sew, do laundry, babysit, etc... it is A LOT OF WORK, TIME, AND ENERGY!!!! For example, I have really been trying to teach Katelund how to cook and prepare food. She is now able to independently make macaroni and cheese, pudding, scrambled eggs, jello, warm things up on the stove and mircrowave, make sandwiches, boil eggs, etc. Yes, it is wonderful that she can do these things but let me tell you....it takes A LOT of patience on my part because I CAN'T stand how messy she is when she cooks. I try to be very positive with her so that she has a good experience but it would just be SO MUCH EASIER and SO MUCH FASTER to just do it on my own. Also, the laundry. OH.MY.GOODNESS!!! It seriously takes Cloey about an hour to fold a laundry basket full of towels. I'm glad she is so particular, but holy cow does it take forever. Then when it comes to putting the clothes away that they fold....well, I'll just put it this way...I might as well have them just throw everything into their drawers without even folding it in the first place. Then there's the bathroom chores. I think that the last time Katelund scrubbed her bathtub, she used about half a bottle of soft scrub because she said that "she liked the smell". Yep, it would all just be so much easier if I'd do it myself. The other day I was fed up with the way that Katelund was loading the dishwasher. She wasn't rinsing the dishes off well enough and then there was the absolute lack of organization to the dishes that she put in there. So, I had her take it all out and start over again. After redoing it, I came back to check, and yep...I totally made her do it all over AGAIN. She was not happy with me, to say the least. She took one of the glass cups and shoved it down into the rack and it completely shattered. So I spent the rest of the evening lecturing her about controlling her anger and doing her very best at whatever job or tasks she is given and then, together, we thoroughly vaccummed the floor TWICE. As I was walking through the kitchen to put Makayla to bed, I stepped on a little piece of glass. The pain shot up my foot and blood was starting to squeeze through. This SAME thing happened to me about a week before my marathon, but I couldn't find it so I just left it alone hoping it would come out on its own. Nope. The night before I flew out to Nashville, Cory was digging through the bottom of my foot with a sterilized needle trying to find the glass sliver. Luckily, he found it without too much carnage. Anyways, I learned my lesson, so this time I immediately got the tweezers and had Cory play surgeon again. So the moral of my dramatic story? Sometimes I would SO MUCH RATHER be a non-teaching mom. Life would be so much easier. But then, it wouldn't because my children would never grow up and then they would be like a couple of my college roommates who had NO idea how to scrub a bathroom because they were NEVER taught how to by their mother. Yep, that would be way worse.