Loads and loads

Say Downy! 

You can't tell from this picture, but here lies at least eight loads of clean laundry that I have to fold today. I don't want to admit it, and I am sure that I will get some kind of mean comment for even posting this, but this is a common occurence around here. This is the result of being too busy to actually tackle the laundry correctly, and I am a freak about keeping it all clean.

Now, unless you have three young children or more, you have NO idea about the huge vastness of laundry that I face on a constant basis. I feel like I am accomplishing something by just keeping it all clean, and it at least gets folded and put away on a weekly basis. (Usually, AFTER the kids go to bed so that they won't sabotage my folding by undoing it all when they jump on it.....as shown above)

When I was a teenager, whenever my friends would be at my house waiting on me to get ready, they all knew that a "SOCK HUNT" was inevitable. My friend, Kristen, named the ritual. The ritual was this: go out to the garage, wade through the mound of clothes on the garage floor (usually at least 20 loads of laundry) and try to come up with two matching socks that Alice could actually wear.(The socks came in all shapes and sizes in this pile because every family member's laundry ended up in the same place...on the garage floor) This ritual could take anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes. You can't even imagine the high that we would get when one of us would find two matching socks in a close vicinity.

My mom just could not keep up, and I understand, she had the same mentalilty as I have adopted... at least it is clean. My dad would get so frustrated at times, especially when our piece of junk washer was broke again. He would take 2 or 3 of us kids to the laundromat for a five hour task. We would fill the back of the station wagon FULL of anything that needed laundering in the house. We children would have the joy of, on the way, trying to find a place to sit among the stinky laundry. We then would get to unload it all at the mat, sort it, and fill every available washer and dryer. This may not sound like fun, but we LOVED it. We would get some treats from the vending machine, and feeding those quarters made us feel like we were at the arcade.

The best part of going to the laundramat was knowing that when we got home, everyone would be forced to finish ALL of the folding. Then for a brief hiatus we each could get socks out of our drawers instead of going to the garage floor for a "sock hunt".