One thing Nikki and I did not count on when we joined forces was the sheer amount of laundry that we would be doing every week. Heck, forget every week... every DAY! We have dirty laundry piles in practically every room: all three bathrooms, each kids' bedrooms, the laundry room (of course), and then we have the habitual "unauthorized piles" of laundry that accumulate in the rest of the rooms.
These unauthorized piles mostly consist of socks. I don't know what it is about kids and socks, but somehow, when they sit in a comfortable chair or couch, the socks spontaneously leap from their feet and land on the floor. The kids are obviously unaware of this unnatural occurrence, because they don't seem to be troubled by it. However, when I point it out to them, they look at their socks in utter bewilderment, as if this will inspire me to pick them up myself since it is obviously not their fault.
We have a laundry chute, and each week we tell them to go to their rooms and throw their dirty clothes down the chute. The pile that results from this is unimaginable. It is about five feet in diameter and rises halfway up to the ceiling. It makes us lightheaded just looking at it! Each week, if we wait until the weekend to do any laundry, it takes a good day and a half to get it all done. If we could afford a maid, this person would do laundry every single day and never run out of stuff to do.
We have two dryers, because if we had to wait for one dryer for each load, we'd never get done. We use the outside clothes-line AND the inside clothes-line whenever possible, too!
We've learned to hard way (more than a few times) to check the pockets before putting any pants in the laundry. Usually their pockets are full of candy wrappers, toys, money, notes from teachers... you know, unimportant stuff! But occasionally we will find their phones or mp3 players or other electronic devices... we've ruined a few of those. The worst is when a pen slips by your notice. We've cleaned up some nasty messes, but we NEVER want to scrub pen ink from the inside of the dryer again!
Now let's talk about towels. We have lots of towels, but we never seem to have enough, so we are doing loads of towels throughout the week. One Sunday morning I woke up first and realized that we only had one clean towel left. Everyone needed a shower for Church, and there was no time to do a load of towels. So, I did what any overwhelmed, I-am-so-sick-of-all-this-laundry parent would do: I drove to Wal-Mart and bought six new towels! We still don't have enough.
Then there's the issue of stains and general nastiness that mostly happened when they were younger, but I will spare the reader from those details!
We have told them many times that our goal is to get them to the point where they are doing their own laundry, because as John Cheese so astutely wrote: "There's nothing sadder than sitting in a laundromat and watching a [grown man] stare at a washing machine like it was a nuclear
reactor." Nikki and I have sworn to the heavens that our children will NOT become one of those people! If they bring their clothes home during college break, they are free to use the washer and dryer, but we are NOT doing it for them! There aren't enough quarters in the world to pay us back for eighteen years of this madness!
