Mom Moments

Laundry is the bane of my existence.

There is always a ton of it.  Especially if you have a small one (who has yet to learn the word NAPKIN), a preschool boy (who lives for dirt), a fashionista (who needs to change multiple times a day, even if we don’t leave the house), and a messy one (who lives by: if it spills, it spills on me).  Four kids = a ton of laundry.

There are too many pieces of clothing per load.  If you don’t have small children, a load of laundry is like 4 pairs of jeans and 3-5 shirts.  But a load of child’s laundry is more like 3 pairs of overalls, 9 pairs of pants, 6 pairs of underpants, 12 bibs, 5 onesies, 11 shirts, 4 undershirts, and 2 jackets.  So one load of adult laundry vs one load of children’s laundry is way different.

There is always more of it, it never ends.  Once, in April of 2006, I was actually “caught up” with the laundry.  There was not a single dirty item of clothing in the house.  I relished that moment and was going to draw it out for as long as possible, so I made my kids wear the same clothes the next day (relax people! it was the weekend!).

There is a difference between “washing and drying” and “doing laundry”.  The mountain in the basement was insanely large this past week.  Its that time of year when NOBODY wants to go in the basement.  In the winter, there’s a wood-burning stove so its nice and toasty downstairs.  In the middle of summer, the cement floor is chilly cool, and the kids are glad to escape down there to beat the heat.  But now, late spring/ early summer, nobody will go down in the basement, they’d rather be outside.  And don’t get me wrong, its not like anyone is helping me down there, I just need them to walk down the stairs so I can keep an eye on them. 

So I learned that one might WASH the laundry and one might DRY the laundry, but if you don’t have time to fold it, and you don’t want it to get musty in the basement while you’re out of town, and you carry it up in baskets and dump it on the bed, and cover your bed evenly with a 3 foot tall jumble of clothes, with boys clothes in such close sizes that you need to check the label on almost every item, oh my goodness you will be up LATE LATE LATE. 

post script- I suppose I make it sound like my husband and I don’t contribute to the laundry mess, so you probably infer we either don’t wear clothes or we don’t ever change them. 

For the record: that’s inaccurate!