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Laundry Surprise

I do a lot of washing. A lot. Apart from my vacuum (which just broke!), the washing machine is the one appliance that I would be hard-pressed to live without. A few years ago, we replaced the old clunker that we bought with the house (and leaked like a sieve) with a high-efficiency model. It gets a workout daily, and has more than paid itself off.

Why so much laundry? Because I have two very messy boys. My children are not the type who can ever re-wear their clothes. Not because they care what they wear from one day to another, but because they get their clothes so darn filthy during the course of a day that said clothes are completely un-wearable without a good, soapy wash. I have never met two such messy children. By the end of the day, Benjamin and Nicholas are usually covered in everything from playdough to jam, milk to dirt…and everything in-between, identifiable or not. Every once in awhile, a pair of pants will end the day more-or-less unscathed, and I can spot clean them for use in the morning. But, that is an exception, not a rule.

All this to say that I do a lot of laundry. Except for this past weekend. We were so busy over Thanksgiving, that even my washer got a holiday. I finally got around to the washing on Sunday, and by that point there was a mountain to rival Everest (slight exaggeration there, but you get the point). As I was folding all the clean, sweet-smelling clothes, I noticed something: there was a pile of clean clothes for Ben, clothes for me, even a good quantity for Pierre (who has no issue wearing the same thing all weekend long!), but very little for Nicholas. A pair of underwear, two pairs of socks, one set of pajamas and an undershirt. That was it. Nowhere near enough, considering that I had gone at least three days without doing a wash. Strange. I looked under the pile of sheets (does anyone else really, really dislike folding sheets?) in the laundry basket, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I hadn't. I double-checked Ben’s folded clothes. No Nicholas clothes hidden there either. Weird. Where were all of the clothes that Nicholas had worn over the weekend?

The mystery was solved when I put away the meager washing that belonged to my youngest. As I opened his dresser drawers I found them, all the dirty shirts and sweatshirts, pants and underwear that had never made it to the wash. They were cozily tucked in with Nicholas’ clean clothes. Dirty underwear nestled beside clean ones. Pants covered in goodness-knows-what on top of freshly washed jeans. Apparently, instead of putting his dirty clothes in the laundry basket each evening before bath, Nicholas had been placing his yuckies back in his dresser drawers. And he has a cold to boot. The unidentifiable suddenly became easy to identify. Ewww…

As grossed-out as I was, and slightly annoyed (great…even more laundry to do now!), I also realized that Nicholas was putting his clothes away. He didn’t put them in the right spot, mind you, but they were away. Maybe he just wanted to help me out by giving me a little less laundry to do.  Kids don’t mind being dirty after all.

Ugh.

xo Naomi

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