Laundry day is a special day
Monday is laundry day in the Ditto household. And I mean all day. And night. It’s like eternal laundry, really. I know some people like to “pop in a load” every morning to “stay on top of the laundry”. But doing laundry every day of the week sounds like a depressing proposition.
I prefer instead to get it over with by making everyone lug their overflowing dirty laundry bins down to the laundry room before they leave for school in the morning so I can spend the next 24 hours washing, drying and sorting everything from socks to dress shirts, along with the occasional tube of chapstick that got left in someone’s pocket.
Would it save me some time and make my life easier if I made my kids do their own laundry? NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT!
Allow me to re-enact what laundry day would look like if I left it up to my kids:
Me: Hey, who left all their wet laundry in the washing machine for two days?
Kids: [Complete silence]
Me, lugging wet laundry into the dryer after first emptying the dryer of its own forgotten laundry: I guess our washer will smell like mildew forever now.
*The End*
I’m not saying I’m some whiz at doing laundry or anything, but I will at least remember to do it, which is more than I can say for anyone else around here.
My laundry system is simple: I sort all of our clothes into three piles: colors, whites, and things you don’t want me to destroy. Some households call this a “delicates” pile, but for us, it’s really anything that you don’t want shrunk, slightly discolored, or stretched out of recognition. These clothes get washed on the coveted “delicate” cycle and are then hung up to dry, as opposed to being fried for an hour among the socks, sweatshirts and towels.
My lack of laundry prowess may be related to the fact that I didn’t learn how to do it until I was in high school and my mom finally got fed up with doing it herself. Up until that point, the only interaction I had with laundry was 1) creating it, and 2) when my mom would call my two brothers and me into the living room, where we would find her holding a plastic laundry bin in front of her.
“It’s time for ‘the joy of socks’,” she would say, dumping the contents of the bin onto the carpet. We would groan as we sat cross-legged on the floor and started matching up pair after pair of socks so our mom could flit off to do other fun “mom” things, like make us dinner again, or patch a hole in the wall from when my brothers decided to play tackle hockey in the basement.
I take things a step further with my own kids; instead of forcing them to participate in “the joy of socks,” I make them experience “the joy of folding everything that is theirs.” Once all the laundry is cleaned and piled into the “holding area” (aka, my bedroom), I put on a movie while the kids are at school and sort the clothes into separate bins—one for each child.
Later in the day, it is each child’s responsibility to fold and put away every last thing in their bin. This technique is met with mixed results. Several months ago, my oldest, Lucy, neglected her pile of clean laundry for so long that I eventually gave up and told her she was responsible for doing her own laundry from there on out. (Luckily, she does it so infrequently that the wet-clothes-in-the-washer scenario is rarely an issue).
The other kids usually get their clothes put away in good time. But Hyrum, the privileged baby of the family, still isn’t responsible for folding his own laundry, which leaves the job up to me. And believe me, his laundry is a low, low priority on my list of things to do. Sometimes his bin of clean-but-unfolded-laundry has sat in the corner of our bedroom for an entire month, with me pulling out school clothes each morning just like a normal person would pull out clothes from a dresser.
Listen, I never said I was good at this, okay? I’m just a desperate mom, trying to find the joy in the socks.