Sometimes I think that I’m pretty good at being an adult. I have a job, I’m married, I have a house, I keep two dogs alive and happy, sometimes I bake things and I read for fun.
But there are two things I have to do as an adult that just aren’t fun or easy: chores and exercise.
To put it plainly, I used to do these things for fun. I was in dance classes for 11 years, my best friend and I used to ride bikes, we’d play Just Dance on the Wii for literal hours. Exercise was easy back then.
We also used to clean. We’d spend entire days cleaning her apartment and then cleaning my house. We only lived a street away from each other, so summers were spent bouncing back and forth between our homes to do things that as an adult I don’t want to do.
Now, I live with one of my best friends: my husband, Kyle. But chores and exercise suck and I’m trying to figure out how to make them suck less.
Being that we are huge nerds, we have the dice sets we use for Dungeons and Dragons laying around the house, so I made a list of 20 chores, as well as a list of ‘side quest’ chores, which we choose from if we roll a 13. Now, every day, each of us rolls a four-sided die to see how many chores we have to accomplish, and a 20-sided die to see which chores they will be.
It’s been working so far. It doesn’t make the chore itself more fun, but it does help get things done during the week so I don’t have to fit all of the cleaning into one day on the weekend.
Plus, if something has to get done, like a load of laundry or the dishes, whoever does that just does one less chore for the day. It’s made the household work distribution easier and fair.
As for fun exercise, I’m looking at a small trampoline. I’ll keep you posted if it’s fun or not.