My Laundry Room is a Secret Dimension of Hell
I've come to suspect that my laundry room is actually a secret dimension of hell over the years for good reason. Laundry is one of those household jobs that falls extremely high on my hate list. I'm not a huge fan of any housework, but laundry is the worst.
It's a job that is never finished. You get to the end of the laundry basket and it will be immediately filled by more clothes, usually the ones you were wearing while you folded laundry. And the biggest annoyance is that the pile just gets bigger every day, especially when there are six people living in a house, one of which thinks she needs to change clothes eight times a day. Dayanera believes there is an outfit for every occasion including playing video games, watching TV, eating each meal, etc.
I tend to approach laundry like a suspicious cop with phrases like, "Didn't I just fold that?", "Why is this in here?", "Is this even ours?", and "Didn't you wear that this morning?"
I try to fold our laundry on the weekends since that is the only time I have to dedicate to the task. My husband washes and dries through the week and piles it all up in the laundry room.
So Sundays I sit down with the laundry and start folding. I fold all day long until I run out of hangers and realize that I still have a good four or five more loads to get through.
I hate laundry. I am seeing things that I'm sure I never bought and I'm almost positive that my daughter's clothes are procreating in the hamper like evil little bunnies.
My laundry room is like an endless pit of work. Incidentally, this is my personal nightmare so I must be in hell. It wouldn't take much to punish me through all eternity, all it would take is housework!
This is why my laundry room is a secret dimension of hell. I'm being tortured for my sins against clothes. The 80's and early 90's did it, I'm sure of it. You should have seen what I wore then! Spandex, ripped jeans, bra tops and fishnet shirts.... yes it was very scary. The gods of fashion are mad and I'm being punished.
My laundry room proves that my house is pandemonium all by itself and if you carry the inevitable logic to its conclusion you will see why my kids are nicknamed the demons. They are the primary source of the laundry so they must be demons. See there’s logic in there!
The demons approach the laundry room suspiciously as well and with good reason. Looking for stuff in hell is hard. Maverick is a prime example of this. We once had the funniest argument ever over hunting for something in the laundry room.
It started with the following question: “Why do I always have to wear clean shorts?”
Yes, people, this is an actual question yelled at me through the laundry room door by my darling son, Maverick.
You see, he'd been wearing the same shorts for at least two days (possibly more before I realized it... ewwww).
Boys are, to put it mildly, gross. They do not care if their clothes can stand up by themselves and walk to the hamper under their own power. In fact, this is an ideal situation for a boy because he doesn't willingly put his own clothes in a hamper (actually putting his clothes in a hamper would cut into that all-important time he spends with a game controller in his hand).
My son is no exception to this sad cliché.
Even worse, is that he'll be all squeaky clean from his shower and will try to sneak the same clothes back on that could give a skunk a run for its money.
When I finally noticed that Maverick was wearing the same pair of shorts that he'd had on the day before and suspiciously dreaded that he may have worn the day before that, I said, "Put on some clean shorts."
He said, "I don't want to!"
I said, "Get some clean shorts on now or you'll be grounded the rest of your life."
This is when he huffed into the laundry room and yelled, "Why do I always have to wear clean shorts?!"
"Because the ones you have on are dirty," was my answer.
The problem isn't so much that my son likes to be dirty, it's more that he's lazy and suffers from a debilitating disease known as it's-a-pain-to-look-for-it-and-I-don't-see-it-immediately-so-it's-not-there-blindness.
Because, as you all know, my laundry room is actually a secret dimension of hell and my son doesn't necessarily put his clothes in the proper places when he's supposed to put them away, he generally has to go looking for whatever clothing item he's been told to put on.
This could mean going in his room, opening a drawer, and being forced to look UNDER the stuff on top or going into the laundry room, without the benefit of a shovel, and looking UNDER the stuff in the various laundry baskets waiting to be folded.
Looking underneath things is hard. It requires energy. Energy is precious. He needs all of the precious energy he has to devote to the all important task of unlocking some character in Lego Star Wars. He does not have the time or the energy to actually move things around to see if what he wants is under them.
Instead, he will walk into the laundry room or his bedroom, glance around and say, "I can't find any clean shorts!"
To which my husband or I will reply, "They're there, you have to look."
He will stand there a moment staring at the drawer or the laundry basket without actually touching it and say, "I did look! Can't I just wear the ones I have on?"
This will prompt me to say, "No. Put some clean shorts on!"
We will have this sort of shouting match through walls before I or my husband lose our patience and go in there to find it for him during which one of us will grumble, "You actually have to move things around and look under them to find something, Maverick."
Mmmmm, I do believe we are being played. I vow from this day forward to make my son find his own clean shorts!
The crazy kid wears shorts all year round which would be fine if we lived in Florida or Bermuda or something, but we don’t. We live in crazy weather central, the bowels of Missouri. It will be 50 degrees in the middle of December and snowing buckets the next day. It doesn’t matter, he will try to leave the house wearing shorts. He probably has a jacket or a hoody on with the shorts, but he’s still wearing shorts. Demons aren’t known for their skills in logic.
Dayanera and Stryker are just as bad. Stryker was constantly streaking around the house sans clothes during the toddler years. I don’t know why the kid wanted to be naked, but he does. These days he’s sans shirt and wearing (you guessed it) basketball shorts. He started out his day in something warm and appropriate, especially in the winter time because I’m too cheap to keep my house any warmer than about 70 degrees. By the time he was put to bed at night, I would have probably put clothes back on him half a dozen times.
This is when I get to practice my skills as a wrestler. He’d run by me as I’m sitting at my computer and I’d notice he was only wearing a diaper. I’d try to snag him before he got by and he’d dance away from me with a big grin on his face.
I’d ask, “Where’s your clothes?”
He would just grin and keep running so I’d have to yell, “Get back here, we have to put your clothes back on!”
“No! No mommy! No clothes!” could be heard from another room, prompting me to get up and go searching for the little streaker.
I would end up chasing him all over the house, around furniture, under tables, and finally corner him somewhere (which was usually somewhere up high because he’s part spider monkey ) so I can wrestle clothes back on him. This probably resembled something like trying to shove a giant octopus into an ugly Christmas sweater. It’s not pretty. Anyway, after a few minutes of wrestling, I’d get his clothes back on him and he’d be off and running again. I know you aren’t shocked to hear that we repeated this process again within at least an hour. Some days I just gave up and figured he’ll keep his clothes on when he got cold.
Dayanera wasn’t about being naked, but she was bad for wearing something inappropriate for the weather, just like Maverick, or worse wearing something that looked like she probably got dressed in the dark using a trunk of items that once belonged to a bag lady. She definitely has her own sense of style. Sometimes it was super-cute and sometimes I was afraid the school was going to call me and ask if we need donations of clothes.
For example, her socks never match. Ever. I know I buy matching socks, but somehow they end up divorced in her sock drawer. I fervently hope they had good attorneys for the divorce and each got equal visiting rights to her feet.
There is also the funky style that is Dayanera. Sometimes this is cute. Sometimes you want to hide your head in shame because she had her coat on over the top of whatever she was wearing and she managed to sneak it passed you to school. For example, I couldn’t seem to get her to understand that an electric blue tutu did not go with an orange Super Mario shirt, pink leggings, black knee boots, and pink sequined cabbie hat.
Bryndlee isn’t as bad as the rest of them on clothes and never has been but she has her quirks. For instance, she becomes super dedicated to a particular item or style of clothes and absolutely refuses to wear anything else. These days that’s these cheerleader type skirts or skater skirts, shirts with cats on them (which is part of the reason we started designing and opened this shop), and hoodies with cats on them. Bryndlee has actually designed many of the items in the shop because of her dedication to these styles.
