You know how you have that one chore that you hate more than anything else? You know what I mean. The one task that, whenever you consider beginning it, you instead find yourself “procrasti-cleaning” anything and everything else in sight just to avoid that one most hated task.
For me, that task is laundry. In fact, just typing the word just made me cringe a little. I recently told my husband that I would give just about anything to outsource my laundry duties to someone else.
“I don’t think there’s anyone out there that comes in to do other people’s laundry, Kim,” he said to me. My response? “I don’t believe that for a second. People will do anything if the price is right.”
Since it’s not really in our budget to hire someone to stay on top of our family’s laundry problems, I instead have to figure out how to face it for myself. I should probably take a second to add that it’s not the actual act of washing and drying my laundry that I hate so much. Instead, it’s the putting away part that is the bane of my existence.
If there is one thing that I’ve learned as a mom, it’s that kids make the amount of dirty laundry in a household grow exponentially. It’s not just that one kid makes our amount of laundry increase by 1/3, or that the second kid meant we had twice as much laundry as we had pre-kids. No, now that kids are in the picture, I’d venture to say we easily have three or four times as much laundry as we used to when it was just my husband and I. How do tiny humans produce so much dirty laundry?
I wish I had a great technique to share with you that is going to change your life and help make a laundry fairy magically appear in your home, but instead I’m just going to tell you the truth—I’ve learned to live a life full of baskets of clean laundry that need to be put away. Try as I may, I can never stay ahead of the mounds of clean laundry in my house. Even when I force myself to spend some time putting away just “some” of the clothes each night, my fatigue wins out and it’s never enough to get ahead. And you know what? That’s okay. Because at the end of the day, I’m going to prioritize that extra 20 minutes to spend on myself over an empty laundry basket every time. If given the choice of spending a few minutes before bed doing something that I enjoy versus putting away clean laundry—the choice is obvious.
As a compromise with myself to ensure that I don’t feel like a TOTAL domestic failure, I’ve made it a priority to make sure my kids’ laundry is put away in a timely fashion. My 4 year old is old enough to help put her laundry away (while the 1 year old chases her around and undoes all her hard work) and I can easily enough take a few minutes to let my toddler play while I shove her laundry into her drawers. I’ve found that I can accomplish both of these tasks while the kids are awake because it involves being in their room. I have a much harder time containing them to my bedroom while I attempt to hang up my own clean clothes.
So in our house, the kids have empty laundry baskets. Me? I have two full baskets of clean clothes at the foot of my bed at any given time. But I also have a few magical minutes to myself each evening before I call it a night, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything–so I guess it all works out in the end.
What is that one task that you just hate to do? Do you have baskets full of clean laundry at home, too?
