I'm being petty...

We have this same issue in our house. When Jeremy points out what he's done expecting praise I always say, I'll start the parade. And sometimes he just looks at me and says, where's my parade? LOL! It's a way to lighten up what can be a very frustrating issue.

Yeah, what is it with that? I can spend a whole day doing all the stuff I typically do without a single comment. He does one single thing and is like, “Didn’t you even NOTICE what I did here?” 🙄 Sorry, NO, I was too busy doing ALL THE OTHER thankless things that nobody ever notices.

I will say to DH after he mows the grass, “The small dog thanks you profusely for mowing the lawn to a sufficient height that doesn’t tickle her hindquarters.” 🤣

That's right, you get your sticker!  I deserve a few gold stars too. 

OMG, could you imagine the amount of stickers would be used if we made our own chart!?!

Man, I need somebody to give me stickers but it's just me and the dog and he doesn't care if we live in a hovel.

Sometimes my dh will say something like “I took out the trash!!” depending on my mood I will say thank you or do you have any idea how many times I’ve taken out the trash in our 30 year marriage, or start listing things I’ve done that day. 🤣 He always looks a bit shocked on those last two. Sigh.

We actually had a good discussion last week and he is upping his game around the house.

LOL that would be great! I could also use all of my colored pens, rubber stamps and diecuts on my chart too. It would be a work of art with all the embellishing I could do!

Oh, I could send you some and then you could say some one gave them to you for your chores chart...

One of the smartest things I did before getting married was handwriting out a chore chart (more of a list). He was a ""I'll take car of the outside, you take care of the inside" type guy. I hell no'd that. I still think I do more, but he does a lot as well. When he complains about the leaf raking, I mention that just cooking a Thanksgiving dinner is way more time.

Love the sticker idea. If my husband told me he did a chore (other than he's going grocery shopping please add what I want to the list), I think I would burst out laughing. Now I do tell him the lawn looks nice and he tells me the flowers look good, so we do acknowledge things, but not for thank yous for keeping the house running.

Hubby is currently watching our granddaughter while I was at work and I'll go cover when he goes to work. Neither one of us will get a sticker.

My dh didnt really get praise when he was a child, so he does this, too. He is at least aware of it and the reasons.

Every once in a while, I try to respond sincerely, but mostly it comes out as sarcasm.

OMG, these posts are making me laugh! Both my ex husband and ex fiancé were like this. I would have loved to have stickers back then. When raising my son, I was determined to stop the cycle of expecting the woman to do the bulk of the chores and to expect praise for doing anything. I started teaching him when he was very young how to do laundry, cook, and clean the house. I would tell him that he needed these skills since he surely planned to eat every day for the rest of his life. I told him he might fall in love with a woman who never learned to cook and he would need to step up and prepare their meals. And oddly, his fiancé never learned to cook and he DOES do all of their cooking. But to be fair, he also went to college to become a chef until he changed his mind and stopped it. But by then, he had learned so much that he certainly can out cook me. I think, because it was just he and I in the house, I tended to include him with most things. I haven’t asked his fiancé, but I am now curious just how much he does chip in at their apartment. I know he does all the grocery shopping and cooking, and I am willing to bet he still does his own laundry because before he left my home he had become super picky about his clothes and how they were hung or folded.

We as mothers need to condition our boys to be better partners to their future wives. I think I did pretty well in the household responsibility area, but I fully admit that I blew it when it came to fussing over him when he was sick. I would make him a little bed on the couch and set up a TV tray next to it with Kleenex, a paper bag trash can taped to it, of course the required 7UP with the bendy straw, and I always kept what he called his “sick soup” in the house. He craved that cheap dry packet of Lipton’s chicken noodle soup with the tiny thin noodles and the overly salty broth. And I even found the same sized noodles because the package never had enough. He would ask me to sit with him and read books to him because he would get headaches and didn’t feel like watching any TV when he was sick. I know I over did it in pampering him.

But in my defense, he got fevers and went through hell when he got cancer so I went into overdrive taking care of him. I couldn’t do a single thing about treating the cancer, but I could take excellent care of him to make the bad times a little less uncomfortable. I even slept in a chair in the hallway of the hospital during his many radiation treatments. The room was lead lined to keep the radiation in so I could not enter the room. And he had to remain inside until the Geiger counter gadget that they ran over him was at an acceptable number for him to come out, usually three days later. He was so scared and just my being there to answer him when he woke up in the night and called out to me made him feel better so you bet I did it. We were told after his first surgery that “things didn’t look good for him” so I needed to spend every minute that I could taking care of him just in case he didn’t make it. And his father was terrified of the radiation exposure so he wouldn’t go near him during his treatments.

I just really hope he doesn’t pull the man cold crap on his fiancé now. If he does, I know it is my fault.

A comment I've read is that when we use the word "help" in the context of household chose it implies that the work belongs to someone else/us vs to both spouses.

I've also heard that instead of acknowledging/praising the other person for "helping" try
acknowledging/praising "noticing" that something needed to be done.

As a SAHM it is an interesting balance for sure. 🤪