The Laundry Manifesto

Dear Kids:

I know that I have admitted in the past that I kind of enjoy doing laundry. I wasn't lying. I like watching my DVR'd shows while folding laundry in the family room. However, there are some aspects of the task of laundry that I do not enjoy. For that reason, I feel compelled to write and share this "Laundry Manifesto."

1. I will wash, dry and fold your laundry. I will not, however, put it away. That is your responsibility.
2. Socks will not be matched or folded. Instead, they will be immediately placed in the sock basket. Please don't ask me for socks. Get thee to the basket and find some for yourself.
3. Clean and folded laundry will be placed in neat piles on the couch. If you wish to sit on the couch, you must first carry the piles to their appropriate locations. The floor is not an appropriate location. Neither is the bottom of the stairs. Nor is under your rear end on the couch.
4. Hell hath no fury like a woman whose laundry piles have been shoved, smashed or unfolded instead of carried upstairs. Put the laundry away or wrestle somewhere else.
5. Once clean laundry is moved from the couch, it should be put away. Pants and shirts with buttons should be hung in your closet. Hollering that you can't find "x" item, only for me to enter your room and find it on the floor will not be dealt with kindly.
6. I am your mother. I gave birth to you and know you probably better than anyone else does. That does not mean I always know which t-shirts are yours. If you discover one of your siblings' clothing in your pile, do not throw it in the dirty clothes. Carry it to their rooms. Even better, be daring and put it away for them.
7. I encourage you to check your pockets before putting clothes in the laundry. Any money left in said pockets becomes the property of the laundress. 
8. If you need something specific to be cleaned and ready for tomorrow, 11pm is not an okay time to let me know that. 
9. You are welcome to use the washer and dryer. If you don't know how, ask. If you choose to do a load of laundry yourself, do the environmentally responsible thing and please make sure it's a load. Two t-shirts do not constitute a load.
10. You know that fury I mentioned in #3? Multiply it by 10 if you put clean items in the dirty clothes. Multiply by 20 if the clean clothes are still folded. 
11. Clean clothes that are found in the dirty laundry will be immediately selected for donation to the Goodwill. 

 If we all follow these simple rules (note: they are not suggestions), we'll get along just fine.

Love,
Mom.

At least he wasn't naked

We had our carpets cleaned yesterday. Because we're still waiting to get our A/C replaced, the carpet cleaners said it would take 24-48 hours for them to dry. We had furniture piled in the kitchen, the front hall and the bathrooms. We decided to pack up and spend the night in a hotel.

I told the kids to pack the field day clothes they would need for school today. Navy blue shirt for Charlie, light blue for Annie, yellow for Robbie -- the colors assigned by their grade levels. They were so excited for a mini-adventure, they all ran upstairs to pack. Even Robbie packed his own bag.

This is where your Spidey senses should be wigging out, as in "check the bag! check the bag!" Unfortunately, my sensors must have been turned off.

When we woke up in the hotel this morning -- everyone should have made-to-order breakfast before work/school, I pulled out Robbie's clothes to find that he must have pulled his yellow t-shirt out of the dirty clothes. There was not a whole lot I could do about it; I didn't have anything else for him to wear. So I (unsuccessfully) tried to scrub the dirty shoulder clean with a washcloth.

After I dropped them off at school, I stopped in the parking lot to e-mail is teacher:

Subject: I can explain...

Why Robbie looks like he's been shot in the shoulder and bled chocolate milk.

Short story: He picked out his own clothes (apparently from the dirty clothes bin) and I didn't check it until it was too late.

Long story: Wet/drying carpets (had them cleaned) and no A/C, so we decided to head to a hotel. INSERT ABOVE EXPLANATION. When it was time to get up this a.m., I discovered the chocolate milk massacre. I contemplated stopping at WalMart for a new yellow shirt, but I decided in a few hours the look would be the same.

About mid-morning, I logged into my e-mail and realized I'd missed a few messages from the night before. Including one from the teacher that said:


Field day dress: Green shirt

Wonderful! Not only did he go to school in a dirty t-shirt, but also in the wrong color. I'm so not winning Mother-of-the-Year this year. I replied with the same sentiment to the teacher who said "I was laughing at your earlier e-mail and I wasn't about to tell you 'green.'"

Have I mentioned I love this teacher?!

I snapped this picture of Robbie after school today. All that mess on the sleeve? Yep. It was there this morning. Luckily for both of us, he didn't seem to mind.

Stop him before he organizes again.

My husband needs a job. I am afraid of what will happen if he continues to spend the majority of his waking hours in our house.

It started with the brown bins. You know, the art deco-ish kind they sell at Target to make you think that THIS time you really are going to get your stuff together?

I think he said that the bins were for school, bills and mail. Or maybe they were for mail, bills and coupons? I can't remember. Right now in their dust-gathering spot on the dining room table, they are for random papers, newspapers and impossibly old school papers. (Don't ask me where the bills are.)

Then there were the big laundry tubs. 5 of them -- one for each member of the family. 4 blue and 1 pink, for Annie because she's a girl. Apparently Mike forgot that I possess a set of ovaries as well. Anyway, I was skeptical of the laundry bins because they are round. Who folds round clothes?

The kids weren't as skeptical as I was about the new laundry tubs. In fact, they love them:

I will admit that the tubs are handy for moving laundry in and out of the laundry room. So it wasn't all for naught, but they aren't working out exactly as Mike envisioned. (Three of them are sitting in the entryway as I type.)

But today, he moved from container cravings to higher realms. Higher as in he bought plastic bed risers to put under the frame of our bed. I went upstairs and felt like I'd fallen into the Princess and Pea fairy tale. Keep in mind that I am only 5'3" on a day when I'm standing up very straight. This new uplifting experience has raised the top of our mattress to about 31 inches. My bed is almost half as tall as I am. And the poor dog -- she can't jump on the top of the mattress anymore. She gets hung up on the edge and just gives you a look like "Hey, can a dog get some help here?"

When I asked him what had motivated him to put our bed on stilts, he didn't hear me at first. He was too busy looking at books on feng shui on Amazon.com, heaven help me. Once I finally got his attention, he said he did it so we can store stuff under the bed.

"Store stuff?" I asked. "We already store stuff under the bed -- dust bunnies, escaped fruit snack wrappers, fugitive socks and an eclectic assortment of Littlest Pet Shop toys and Legos."

Mike failed to see the humor or the logic in this.

"No, really," he went on. "See, I got these baskets to slide under the bed to store stuff." 

Again with the baskets?! But I hold my tongue because my dearly departed mother-in-law was famous for using laundry baskets as a haphazard filing and storage "system" and I think the mourning period is still in effect. Instead, I asked Mike what "stuff" he had in mind for the baskets. 

"The stuff that we have all over. The stuff in the closets."

"You mean the stuff we should just give away and be rid of?"

His body language conceded defeat on that one. But then he came in with the save -- "For shoes! We can store our shoes in the baskets under the bed."

Again, because I'm trying not to be too disagreeable I offered up an "ok," not mentioning that if we cleaned out the closets, there would be plenty of room in there for the shoes. 

I did ask what the acceptable weight load for these plastic risers is. He said something about using 6 risers instead of 4 so it will be fine. I'm thinking we might want to sleep in shifts, just in case. We are not the smallest people, after all.

I can only imagine what he's got planned for tomorrow, and I am afraid.

The pros and cons of 12

Consider the number 12.

It can be a nice number. There are the 12 days of Christmas. The 12 months of the year. 12 eggs in a carton. The 12 apostles of Jesus. Charlie's 12th birthday this summer.

Even the sound of the word is a bit sophisticated. "Tw-el-ve." All that blending of syllables seems a little aristocratic.

There is size 12 in clothing, which may or may not be a good thing depending on which side of size 12 you stand on. Personally? I'd be elated to see a 12 again.

A shoe size of 12 might make you happy if you are a man (or are married to a man with a size 12 foot). Although a size 12 in the women's shoe department does not carry quite the same badge of honor.

But the worst 12 there is? The most unhappy 12 I can think of today?

The 12 loads of laundry I need to deal with today. (There are so many, I can't fit them all in the picture, plus 2 are in the washer and dryer). 

Once they are all clean, only half of those items are going back upstairs. The other half will find their way to the Goodwill today -- even if it takes me 12 trips to get them there.

What is your favorite (or least favorite) 12?

The blog posts that weren't

I've spent too much time tonight trying to decide what to blog about. Here are the topics that didn't make the cut:

1. Movies to fold laundry by. Been there, blogged that.
2. As seen on TV products I'd like to own
3. Black Friday black out -- no crazy shopping for me this year.
4. On being a boy Mom
5. Hanging on for dear life -- A video I shot from my office today of squirrels in a tree. This one might appear later.

If you blog, feel free to borrow one of these ideas. Got any other brilliant blog topics you'd like to read here? I'm all ears!

Saturday morning reality check

Ok, first reality check -- it's not Saturday morning. It's Saturday afternoon and I'm still in my jammies with no real intention of changing out of them for at least another hour or so.

Second, you know all that waxing nostalgic about Little House in the Suburbs and roughing it by doing dishes by hand, leaving the windows open and cooking from scratch? Well, the windows are closed, the air is on, we bought pizza from Papa Murphy's last night (it was at least cooked in our oven), and I'm calling the repair guy on Monday to come fix my dishwasher. One of the reason I'm still not dressed is because I was doing dishes this morning, stopped to make Belgian waffles, then had the original dishes plus the waffle mess to wash up.

Now that the kitchen is (mostly) back in order, I have to wrangle the laundry. I've said it before, but this time I might mean it. I'm limiting my family to 3 pairs of shorts, 2 pairs of pants, 5 pairs of underwear, 4 t-shirts, 2 nice shirts and 2 pairs of pj's each. If I stacked up all the dirty laundry into one big pile, I bet I could set a world record. I wonder if there is a world record?

Actually, I don't mind doing the laundry. Washing, drying, even folding. (Don't tell my family, but I kind of enjoy it.) It's the putting away that I absolutely despise. Maybe if we had fewer clothes to put away, it would be less of a vile job?

The real task of the weekend is to clean my bedroom. This is closely tied to the laundry b/c there are clothes everywhere. I would take a picture to show you, but even I'm not that bold. Suffice it to say, the bedroom floor is like the moon -- uneven surfaces, mounds of physical matter and occasional craters. It's hard to yell at your kids about their bedrooms when your own could be declared a federal disaster area.

I'm hoping to make some good headway in the bedroom before Robbie and I leave for our "date" tonight. (He does not have an aversion to the word like Charlie does). Thanks to an anonymous benefactor -- and I do mean THANK YOU -- Robbie and I are going to see "Walking with Dinosaurs" tonight. I think it's gonna be awesome!

What's on tap for your weekend? Hope it's a good one.