CG,
Good post. I shall be waiting to see if any gentlemen have any inside help for you because I will be taking notes. I try hard not to nag also but sometimes it gets to the point where things just drive me crazy.
I'm laid off right now (lovin it) so I have the time to walk behind him to pick up, but when I'm working 40 hours a week it wears me out.
You gotta laugh at the hamper thing. I have a hamper right beside where he takes his clothes off and yep! every morning I have to pick up the underware & T-shirt, socks are left beside the couch. Why? He DOES take his dishes to the sink and rinse them out and..........sit them in the sink. The dishwasher is right next to the sink. Put them in there. I got new carpet finally and he knows there had better not be the big old muddy boot prints from one end of the house to the other like the good old days. I put a chair by the front door on the porch and that is where his boots come off or he dies, plain and simple. The one that always gets me is the tooth paste spit and whiskers in the sink. For years now it has been an on going issue. I clean sink, he brushes teeth and leaves one tooth paste spit higher then the water line, then taps razor on side of sink to get dry whiskers out, leaves tooth paste and razor on sink instead of in the cup they came from. I see this as passive aggressive behavior. He has finally started to use a wash rag and wipe out the sink. Now in about 10 years he should be putting the tooth paste and razor back.
These things are so simple to stop but they become a power struggle. Why? Is it so that if they keep us busy on a bunch of little things we won't have the time to get into the bigger character flaws they may have?
Since I have been off work I have worked very hard around the house to clean up the years of neglect, inside and out. There is this TOOL BOX we have been going round and round about. Big black plastic box that is screwed into a big piece of plywood that slides into his pickup truck. 3 months ago he took it out of his truck and put it on the front porch. At reasonable intervals I remind him nicely that our goal is cleaning the place up and he needs to find a home for this BOX. I asked him how he would like me to ask him in a way that would make him want to do it (I'm game for anything if it will work). I said "If nothing else put it back in the truck that is sitting in the driveway with nothing in the bed of it, until you figure out what to do with it". That was two weeks ago. My nice is almost gone now and the "B***H" is going to show her ugly little head and he won't know why. I would do it but it is to big and heavy for me (I've tried).
One thing I do know CG, is that once the chicks leave the nest, your attention is now more focused on the big bird that is left. Your time is not divided now so the one that is left gets all your attention be it good or bad. We expect so much more from our adult children .