An Obvious Tip

I enjoy doing laundry. Any chore that requires me to do very little to accomplish so much is a big plus to me. However, I seriously dislike washing dishes, and I have a dishwasher. These two chores are very similar, but there is ONE BIG DIFFERENCE: the pre-rinsing.

I don't pre-rinse my clothes. Why should I when I have paid for a machine to do all of this work? I acknowledge that pre-rinsing my clothes is great for removing stains, but I don't HAVE to do that before each load or else risk breaking my machine. Apparently, you have to rinse your dishes before loading them or the dishwasher gets clogged. I find that ridiculous! The machine should be made to accommodate large chunks of food coming off.

It won't surprise you to discover that I don't pre-clean my home before maids come over either.

Which reminds me, I wish we had a maid again.

Anyway, I didn't mean to flame off about the pre-rinsing necessity. Instead I wanted to point out the one flaw in my enjoyment of doing laundry. Since I enjoy it, I usually do one or two loads a day. Whatever clothes my family needs, I wash - for the most part. However, if my children are needing their school clothes washed, I don't wash ALL of their school clothes. I just put together one load and do it.

The other day, my son requested his play shirts be washed. I went about gathering one load of laundry that included some of my son's favorite shirts, and voila! He had a drawer with three play shirts inside. I looked again at his stack and realized that my son needed more play shirts.

I went online to order some play shirts that were on sale, and they arrived about 5 days later. Great! I went to put the shirts in his drawer, and suddenly, there was no more room to put shirts! His drawer was overflowing with them!! What happened there?!

Well, I'll tell you what happened... I'm a dufus. That about sums it up. If this was the only time I had made this kind of error, I would have called it an "Oops", but as it is, I've done this about four other times with other articles of clothing, so it really is that I'm just a dufus.

You see, since I love to do laundry, and I do 1-2 loads every day, I rarely see the bottom of the clothes hampers. Usually, about once a month, I will decide to hold a laundry day, and get it all done (except for the odd sheet, blanket or jacket). Being a dufus, I forgot to check the clothes hampers for DIRTY PLAY SHIRTS before deciding I needed to order more for my son. Hence, the drawer overflowing with play shirts.

The nice thing about this mistake is that it forced me to do the that-shirt-is-slightly-too-small-on-you drawer purge. Bye-bye beloved surfer shirt! Yeah, I really know how to pick my moments. My son was whining about the lameness of the new shirts, the need for the old shirts, and how unfair life was.

But, I got all of the shirts in the drawer.