Monday, December 15, 2008

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.

5 comments:

All Things BD said...

I'm currently purging small clothes from the girls' drawers. Problem: big girl never wore long sleeves, so she has none to hand down to little girl. How is that fair? I STILL have to buy new clothes for LG as well as for BG, who refused to stop growing each season.

Jennifer P. said...

I am forever making that mistake with kids' pants! I think they need more---but they really just need to be washed!

DJ said...

I can't really say that I like doing laundry, but, you're right, it is better than doing dishes. And, hey, isn't it best that they learn how unfair life is early on? :)

Tabitha Blue said...

Haha, well we just purged clothes from my girls' room... but mostly because I'd put something on her and it was too small!! I really had to go through her stuff... and I cleaned every inch of her room... she was walking around her room saying, "it smells so good in here!!"

Well, good luck with those dishes... I loathe that job as well.

:)
~Tabitha~

freshmommyblog.com

Anonymous said...

You guys(girls) all lead very busy lives! How can you not do all the laundry in the laundry basket, day after day? That makes no sense to me. You have clothes you spend good money on, and they don't get used. I like doing laundry too, but I love seeing it all done, and then I don't have to think about it for days. I don't mean to sound off on this, maybe I've oopsed?! We all have every right to do laundry AS WE PLEASE.