So there’s laundry. And then there’s putting laundry away. One of these things doesn’t happen at our house.
I usually slave over at least eight loads of laundry every Tuesday–and that’s if the boys don’t put all their dirty clothes in the laundry, which they actually did this weekend, after we helped them clean their room and found six weeks worth of clothes on the floor. Not really. It was more like eight.
We hung most of them up, because I wasn’t about to put them all in the laundry, but some of them were obviously dirty, after a smell test performed by anyone but me, because you could not pay me enough money to hold up a boy’s sock–clean or not–to my sensitive nose. Well, maybe for a certain amount of money. How much are we talking?
Anyway, like I was saying, when the boys actually put all their dirty clothes in the laundry it’ll typically gain me an extra load or two.
It takes me all day to do laundry, because I don’t own a laundromat. And then it takes at least 45 minutes to sort it all.
I know, I know. Boys should be helping. And they will, eventually. It’s just that I usually only get to laundry when they’re in school, because when they’re home I’m so busy putting out fires and keeping them out of the refrigerator I can’t possibly juggle laundry in all that activity. I’m easily overstimulated. What can I say?
Also, I would kind of like to have my laundry done and not stalled out, which happens often when boys are invited into the laundry process. Mostly because we have the heavy-duty machines with a billion buttons, and if we know anything at all about kids, we know they like pressing buttons. So sometimes the towels get washed on delicate cycle in boiling hot water with enough water for a “tiny load” instead of the “gigantic load” it is. And sometimes, if I’m really lucky, the washer won’t even be washing like I think it is, and I won’t know until my phone timer goes off, telling me the load is done and I find that it is not, in fact, done, because someone pushed the start button one extra time, and it never got past the soaking stage, which just, essentially, added a whole hour to my laundry day.
So I just do it myself for now.
The way I fold laundry is I first dump it all out on my bed and then sort it into its eight different piles. My thought process behind this is that if those piles are blocking my bed, that means we can’t go to sleep until they’re put away. Husband, who is charged with the responsibility of teaching boys to put laundry away, because I’ve just spent my whole day washing it, doesn’t feel the same way, though. The piles are just things to be moved. And where he moves them is to the banister outside our bedroom door.
Here’s what the breakdown usually looks like from there:
Boy: Mama, I don’t have any sweat pants in my drawer.
Me [jugging the baby on a hip while I finish up frying eggs for breakfast because protein is king]: Okay. It’s probably in your laundry pile. I’ll come help you in a minute.
Boy: Okay. [disappears.]
[I finish up breakfast and get the plates on the table, set the baby in his high chair.]
Boy: [yelling from upstairs]: Don’t worry, Mama! I got some.
Me: [physically deflates]
I deflate because I know this is what it’s going to look like when I go back upstairs. Apparently, every single time we do laundry, the sweat pants, which are the only things my kids want to wear anymore, are always on the very bottom of the pile. Which means those sorted laundry piles don’t stay sorted laundry piles for long.
We’ve gotten so used to walking on clothes I don’t know what we’re going to do when someone decides to clean this up.
