Colouring Inside the Lines

With clearly drawn lines of accountability and subsequent consequences for not meeting the mark, I can colour inside the lines like nobody's business - be it succeeding in a demanding career, organizing and hosting everything from small dinner parties to large gatherings of a 100 people or so, or managing a group of volunteers on a project. Whatever it is ... I am gettin' 'er done! However, without those lines my life drawing looks like this ...

I am messy, disorganized and the worlds worst (or maybe best), procrastinator.

Retired life very often lets me scribble all over the place. Frank is the kind of guy who has his daily to do list at the ready by end of breakfast. He lays his clothes for the next day out before he goes to bed, he sets my underwear out for the day every morning (that is something he has done for many years ... he's a bit of a lingerie freak ;)) and the coffee pot is set up after supper to go on automatically the next morning. I often tease him by telling him he's OCDish in that he has a daily routine that he rarely ever wavers from.

With the introduction of ttwd, Frank is more than happy to be given an opportunity to draw those lines of accountability for me ... and provide the consequences when I colour outside them. We started very small ... 2 rules ... you will not leave dishes in the sink and your clothes will be picked up and put away - not left hanging over chairs and dressers (funny that ... his two pet peeves solved in one fell swoop :>)). He has since added an 'up and at it, showered, dressed and ready to greet the day by 10 AM' rule. It's a late time because we have in bed coffee, paper reading, reading reading and often sexy time in the morning after he finishes exercising and letting the chickens out. He tells me it's going to become an earlier time as our daylight hours return. Next he added no pleasure use Ipad or reading between the times of after breakfast and after supper unless it's while taking food breaks. And yesterday morning he suggested I write down what I was going to accomplish for the day ... Yup!, my man is liking this!

On the consequences side, we're still working on that. He is not quite comfortable with the spanking side of things ... we've done it in play for many many years so it's not a new concept ... we both are playtime spanking fans. However the idea of non play spanking as discipline is new. He's willing to go there but we're still trying to figure out limits, pain thresholds and the like. In the meantime non spanking DD has made its debut ... 

Yesterday morning I decided to have a bath instead of a shower. We were chatting while he was shaving when he turned around and looked at me and said 'you know you only have 10 minutes left' ... I replied that I would be ready (oh yeah, we need to add 'concept of time' to the box of crayons I use to colour outside the lines). 

By the time I was out, dried and had my underwear on, he had me by the arm, leading me out of the bathroom, where he plunked my butt in a chair he had sitting in the middle of the bedroom. He walked out and into the kitchen where he set the microwave timer, announcing I could get up when the timer went off ... and then he left.

I am taking this seriously. I approached him with the concept of DD/ttwd so it is my responsibility to do my best at taking it seriously. I sat there and pondered 'this thing we were doing' and where it is taking us. He was back in the bedroom just as the timer went off. He pulled me up up, hugged me, kissed me and asked me how I felt. I explained my serious thinking. Later when we talked more he mentioned how quiet I was at the time and asked if I knew why. I confessed I'd felt a bit teary. Not sure why ... I just did.