It's midnight, do you know where your laundry is?

Mine is spinning around in the washer. Darks. Dark school uniform pants. Why does it never hit me until midnight that my boys have run out of pants? Why don't I just buy FIVE pairs of pants for the FIVE days of the week and be done with it? Why? Why? WHY? The agony of the laundry.

I've been trying to compose a little ditty about laundry but I'm not quite there yet. It's along the lines of "How much wood could a wood chuck chuck, if a wood chuck would chuck wood?" I'm thinking "How many loads of laundry could a lovely lady load if a ...." but it's not right. It's just a load of...(you know I don't cuss out loud so you have to fill in the blanks).



You know in my very first post I promised to blog about laundry - so check this one off your list - laundry accomplished. That's the only time you will ever get to check that off your list (unless, of course you're a man - no list, no laundry, what's she talking about?) because laundry is NEVER accomplished. I'm actually fairly proud of my system for staying on top of laundry. It's not exactly Fly Lady (pretend that's a hyper link and you can go check out the Flylady website) but it is a system and it keeps the laundry in motion. I have a three bin hamper/sorter in my laundry room - whites, lights, and darks. I need a fourth bin for delicates but it doesn't exist so they go in a pile on the floor next to the hamper. As I sort, wash, dry, and fold - they go into stacks - each child and adult has their pile and....hold your breath...their color coded hangers!!! This is very important for two not the same sized boys who wear school uniforms. Look at the tag once - hang it on the right colored hanger and you don't have to look at the tag again to figure out whose shirt you've got. It's bliss.

Despite my system, there are laundry problems. My laundry does not run like a well-oiled machine from beginning to end. Tween doesn't like the one step that mom doesn't do for him - put your clean clothes away. So he hides them. He tosses shirts up onto the shelf of his closet, he throws underwear in with the linens, he pushes shorts under the bed - he puts so much energy into hiding them from me, why doesn't he just put them away? Maybe I will try reverse psychology and say, "Whatever you do, do not put any of these clean clothes into those drawers!" "I better not find any of these clothes stacked in those drawers or you are in trouble!" I'll let you know how that works. DD- (have to think of cute blogging names - I know!) - lives behind a closed door. She's a teenager, that's the way it goes, no problem. But...whenever I catch a glimpse behind the door, I see laundry. stacks of clean laundry - in the baskets, on the dresser, and, this is the one that slays me, on the floor. Apparently DD also has a problem with the last step. What these two problems have in common is also the end result - "clean" laundry ending up on the floor and magically turning back into "dirty" laundry without ever having been worn. When I am pulling clothes out of my sorter/hamper to wash and they are STILL FOLDED from being washed the previous week - I see red!

So, I'm off to check my laundry - I promise this won't be my only post about laundry. That's right - laundry remains unfinished business! You see I have this idea about trying to calculate the total time I have spent on laundry. 1 load a day, 365 days a year, for twenty years, then add extra loads on weekends when I "catch up" and all the mid-week midnight uniform loads, and all the beach towels used for an hour but now they're sandy loads, and all the bedwetting loads, and all the dog hair/cat hair on perfectly good linens loads, and the towels used once and dropped on the floor of the bathroom loads, and the puppy peeing on the area rug by the door loads and...see, it's higher level math - needs it's own post!