The Asher Bean came down with a double earache this past weekend (nowhere near as amazing as a double rainbow, I assure you) and our wonderful pediatrician was on a quick vacation (the nerve!) so I was home Monday and Tuesday nursing the little man along until the doctor could see him and get some meds in him. Now Asher’s back on top, and we’re getting back to normal. I love that children want to feel normal and happy more than anything else. Asher kept doing things that normally bring him a lot of joy and then coming over to lay his head on my shoulder, limply holding the truck that would usually make him happy and looking at me like, “this thing makes me smile. Why am I feeling lousy still?” and then he would attempt to play again because playing is a lot more fun than laying around. So we cycled like that all day, little pops of fun followed by long hugs and longer naps.
During one of those naps I attacked our laundry room. And now I will confess the following things to you: I’m only an ok house keeper. Really, I’m kind of like a professional tidyer. I keep things tidy, but often all that straightening up is really more like a “keeping up with the Jones'” housekeeping style, because you can bet your unmatched socks that all of that quickly grabbed stuff during a tidy just lands somewhere else until I come in with the scrub brush (trash bags) raised and just go to town.
This method has been taking place in our laundry room for quite some time for two three main reasons. The first is that the laundry is in our dark creepy unfinished basement and there’s just nothing charming or inviting or organized feeling about the space. (Quick parenthetical aside since I’m confessing things? I have to suck my breath in every time I go down the stairs because I have a deep-rooted paranoid feeling about seeing someone–generally a man–just standing in our basement. I’m never really worried about this fictional person doing anything, but I live in regular fear of being startled by someone just standing there. That is weird.) The second problem with the laundry room is that it is the world’s best out-of-sight-out-of-mind catch-all, and the third and most obvious problem with the laundry room is that I loathe doing laundry.
So while Asher napped yesterday, I cleaned the snot out of the laundry area and organized and generally set out on a mission to wash every single thing in our house that needs to be washed. I did 5 loads of laundry yesterday and intend to do about 4 more tonight. The first 5 loads are dried, folded and stored. The next 4 are giving me heartburn. How did it come to this? For a family that has the washing machine running almost every single day of the week, how is it possible that I have nearly 10 loads of laundry laying around needing to be dealt with?
Well. No more. I am turning a laundry corner. Publicly. I am making a personal (and now oddly public) pledge to knock it off, or more specifically knock it out and we will now be working smart and not so hard with this whole sudsy business. Drew deeply believes that things that don’t go together outside of the washing machine shouldn’t go together inside the washing machine and thus he does his own laundry about 3-4 times a week. I think this is almost as strange as my paranoia about seeing someone calmly standing in our basement. He really doesn’t like to mix work-out clothes with work clothes with weekend clothes etc etc. So I am going to talk to Drew about combining our clothes (I know! Gym socks! Jeans! All that co-mingling of unmentionables!) so it will all be done and I will start to feel like June Cleaver again. You’ll note that I have not reduced the number of loads per week with this incredible domestic deduction, but I have now successfully incorporated my own laundry into the epic cycle and theoretically reduced the number of times that I laugh about Drew’s socks talking dirty to his t-shirts. Smart not hard, team.
If you’re someone who’s reading this while sipping grown up cocktails and actually thinking about the horrible situation in Libya, shocked that I am blathering on about laundry when there’s so much that really matters in the world, well…what can I say? Some days you think about saving the world, other days you think about selfish personal betterment to the tune of mastering a domestic skill that has been previously elusive. The whole time that I was folding and scrubbing and throwing away yesterday, all I could think about was my on-going mantra that life is short! And if I can tighten up on this stupid laundry situation, I can get back to something a little more meaningful in my down time, because life is short, and as long as I live, I would like to never ever be in a situation of needing to do 10 loads of laundry in a 24 hour period ever again. We can spin that in a heart-strings-make-Oprah-proud light, or we can just call a spade a spade and acknowledge that it’s time to tighten up.
How about you? Care to share what you’re working on mastering?
Flux Capacitating 
Love it! Thanks for sharing….. I thought you might be inspired by one of my favorite laundry rooms of all time. I don’t have a laundry room, but when I do, I imagine it looking like this: http://shoppingcandy.blogspot.com/2010/04/office-area.html
Oooo, I love how bright it is! And I also like the knob detail, those are the kinds of things that make me happpppyyy! 🙂
Seems there is always something to master, but in the large general sense of things, simplification, is my goal. I have sooo much to keep up with, my job and all my patients, their labs, their meds, the state of their chart, the wonderful folk I work with daily and actually getting there on time. My personal life, grown children, grandchild, 90 year old mother, trying to court and spark a little, and design, make, and market my jewelry, compels me. So with the knowledge that people are my calling, I’m trying to have less “stuff”. I’ve been reading about having 100 items, and find it fascinating. Which for me includes rules like buy well the first time, and don’t keep stained blouses!
My advice to you, precious Meelie Bug, is move those laundry functions to the bathroom!
Rosie, my dream is to have the laundry and bathroom combined. Clothes off and into the wash!
The laundry and the dishes have been my constant foe since Charlotte joined our family. I could somewhat handle it all when it was just Jeff, Caroline, and me, but then adding Charlotte to the mix set me back. And I’ve never recovered. Now that Camille is here . . . well, it’s almost a lost cause. The moment I get caught up, those girls wear another outfit or then get grits on their PJ’s and toothpaste on their blankies and use washcloths in their bathes and . . .You get the point.
I am with you in this battle! I did make a laundry chart that I sometimes use that is helpful. When I use it. And I have resolved that I must run the dishwasher each night (I know its wasteful, but in my life waste wins over right now). If I don’t, I’ll have a dishwasher, sink, and counter full of dishes both clean and dirty.