Laundry

The two largest jobs in any home with children are food and laundry. Now, to just say "food" is an unfair understatement. There is every task from planning, to listing, to shopping, to storing, to preparing, to feeding the family, to cleaning up dishes and storing some more. There are recipes to be found, leftovers to use creatively, cooking methods to plan for busy days or lazy days, nutrition and appeal to consider, etc. It's a huge, endless job in one tiny little word.


But then there's laundry. Add a baby, live in a place where the towels get nasty very quickly, start potty training a toddler, have a boy, and a soldier, and the laundry gets bad and I mean fast. I took a couple of days off of folding and look what happened.

This is my queen sized bed. That pile is as tall as Pebbles. The sheets had been stripped because Pebbles dumped a whole bottle of berry-scented hand sanitizer on my side. The frangrance absolutely had to go. This pile does not include the three loads still in the process over in the kitchen, as well as the two loads that magically appeared the very next day. This also doesn't include bed linens or the blankets on the asthma-kid's bed. I have a high effiency washer that washes about twice what a normal washer can handle.

Princess asked me an interesting question on the way home from school once: "Mom, would it be nice to have servants?"

I gave an internal cry, and pondered that. If I had someone doing just one of these jobs... ah. To not worry about food! Ah!! To not worry about my clothes going from clean all the way to clean again! Those two jobs!! Just! Two! Freakin! Jobs!

Her question arose from watching old movies (Mr Hobbs Takes a Vacation, Cheaper by the Dozen) and these super moms who are either drop dead gorgeous or have a fantastically huge number of children both have house help.

"Yes, honey, it'd be nice to have some help."

I sit here, typing this, with three loads asking to be folded (this is two days after the mountain above got resolved) but my kitchen is clean. Man's lunch is ready for him. Breakfast will be eggs and toast and fruit. Tomorrow's dinner will be homemade rolls and bbq beef we cooked up and stashed before Frieda was born.

I wonder if it'd be better to have one of these jobs completely figured out, or to have both of them kinda, sorta juggled.