Dirty Laundry

Confession time...are you ready? I hate doing laundry. And it hates me. I can't seem to ever get to the bottom of our giant McBride Family Laundry Hamper. I thought by consolidating our family's laundry into one hamper that it would somehow help me keep tabs on the laundry situation, but no dice. The pile in the hamper just seems to stay at about the same level no matter how much I slave away at my two nemeses: the washing machine and the dryer. Why do I hate doing laundry? In these modern times of indoor plumbing and Downy balls, it is like the easiest thing in the world to do. It's almost space age, like a flying car or something...just throw in some dirty clothes with a little magic powder, push a button and, forty minutes later you have clean clothes! I remember my mom telling me a story about a friend of her mother's who was the first person my mom ever met who owned a dishwasher. My mom and her mother stood in this woman's kitchen as she walked them through the process of loading the dishes, pouring in the soap and voila! Clean dishes. "You still have to put them away though," my grandmother's friend sighed. And that's the thing with laundry that I have the biggest problem with. The putting away part. The putting away part generally drags on way too long at my house. It can go on until there is a new week's worth of laundry to put away or until a guest comes over who might venture deep enough into our house to witness my piles of laundry. Guests are great motivators to me. Guests to my house probably think I am the type of person who puts her laundry away...and puts the newspapers in the recycling bin before they have somehow piled up to be taller than Charlie...and vacuums the horrible place under the table where the kids eat their meals. I have everyone fooled!

While we're on the subject of things that get on my nerves, does anyone else with young children get sick of constantly feeding them, or is it just me? It's been about 4 1/2 years of being a mom and I am still amazed at the amount of time I spend doling out food, cleaning up food off the floor and table, washing dishes, going to the grocery store for more food and washing the food stains off of clothes. I'm not even counting all the time I spend "discussing" what kinds of foods are acceptable for breakfast, snack 1, lunch, snack 2, and dinner(i.e. why we can't have m&m's for every meal).

Does anyone have some super organized plan for keeping their house clean and their clothes clean and their kids fed? If so, I don't know if I can be friends with you anymore. Ha. Ha. Okay...it's 4:09 p.m. The kids are pouring all of their toys in their suitcases in preparation for the pretend vacation they're singing about right now. From the sounds of things they'll be needing a lot of spoons and Lincoln Logs on this vacation. Looks like I have just enough time to pop in a load of laundry, clean up after snack #2 and start cooking dinner.