Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

Okay, random question here. I am writing a fictional story, and I need a "get your chores done" sort of phrase for the mom to tell the child. Preferably one that would get annoying if said in a mean way. But a motto type phrase to spur a kid on if they are being lazy or something. Did any of your moms have phrases like that? I hope this makes sense . . .

I know what you're talking about, but I'm drawing a blank. I'll discuss it with my mother to see if we can come up with anything.

My parents certainly didn't have anything like that. They were very laid back about that sort of thing. But I had a young women's leader who would start singing that "I will go, I will do the thing the Lord commands" song from the Primary songbook when her son wasn't doing what she told him to do. Certainly very annoying, but that would probably only work if you characters happen to be Mormon.

"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"

..... Ok, probably not quite what you were looking for....

one parent I knew would say "It looks like I need to tape record myself saying 'do your chores' because I keep saying it"

Something we're trying to instill in my siblings is that computer time isn't a right, it's a privilege, and to earn that privilege, they need to clean their rooms, do their chores, finish their homework, not fail classes, help make dinner...

"Thou shalt not be idle; for he that is idle shall not eat the bread nor wear the garments of the laborer." (D&C 42:42)

Hmm. NerdGirl and Vorpal Blade have good ideas, except that my characters are not religious. Marduk's was irrelevant, but hilarious. Whistler's is good, but not quite what I am looking for somehoe. And I think bob's privledge thing has some promise, but I'm not sure how to word it.

Let me know if anyone else thinks of something. This is quite entertaining. Thanks everybody!

oh, I had a mentor who would tell me to tell myself when I wanted to procrastinate that "the best time to do this is now."

"You'll shoot your eye out! You'll shoot your eye out!"

Eat a live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

Or, in other words, get the worst task done first. After that, the rest will be easy. I dunno if it works for all of chores… but maybe if there is one chore your character particularly hates?

To get the children to clean up their rooms we frequently said "Okay, whatever I find on the floor in your room in an hour is mine!" Which usually resulted in a lot of stuff piled on the beds. Sometimes we were tested, though, and they didn't see their stuff again for a long time.

If it was mowing the lawn or cleaning the bathrooms the threat was usually something like this, "No dinner for those who procrastinate doing their chores." Not exactly a slogan.

I understand that among the Hopi Indians mothers would gently rebuke children with "This is not the Hopi way."

Sometimes we would say, "Do you want to live in a pig pen?" One of my sons picked this up and once said, when surveying his bedroom (which he shared with two brothers), "This pig pen is a mess!" It became a family favorite.

Often it was simply, "You can't go out to play until you've gotten your chores done."

"You don't have to want to, you just have to do it."
My mother's favorite response to the oft-uttered phrase:
"But I don't want to!"