Textile Management

It is almost 9pm and I'm still dealing with laundry. I used to wonder what stay-at-home moms did all day and now I know: textile management. It's a never ending job and the most time consuming and boring of all the mostly boring home management tasks that I do.

This is how it works: I get up, haul a load of laundry downstairs. Bring up the clean load, dump it on my just made bed (and making the bed is only a 2 minute per day job, and I know because I've timed it!) Throughout the morning more laundry accumulates - the boys' jammies, the bibs from breakfast, Yogi's clean outfit that he got all wet while playing with the hose on the way to the car to go to preschool, the pile of white bar towels that we use to clean up spills and little messes. Ok, so now I have another load to bring downstairs. The loads just keep moving through until it's evening and we've just put the boys down and I start in on the folding. And the putting away.

But it's more that just doing the laundry. It's the ongoing job of culling through the drawers and closets pulling out the things they've grown out of. Sorting them for donation or hand-me-down. It's buying new stuff in larger sizes and then returning things that ended up being the wrong size. It's a huge job. And, I'm not even kidding, I have to go now so I can finish putting the piles away that are still sitting on my bed so that there's room for me to get in it.