Day 521: Mom is a very dirty word

Here’s what I don’t understand: how can a person the size of a small lapdog generate such an outrageous amount of dirty laundry? It is truly beyond my comprehension. I should probably fess up to the fact that I hate doing the laundry with a passion that most people reserve for things like war and taxes. I loathe it. I hate the washing of it, the folding of it, the putting it away. I hate the sight of it, plain the simple.

I swear the amount of laundry in our house tripled the day Mads was born. A friend of mine gave me a pastel pink laundry hamper as a shower gift and while I thought it was adorable I really couldn’t see needing an entire hamper just for the kid. And yet here I am, hauling it out of her room nearly every day full to the brim with all sorts of stinky stuff: pee soaked onesies and dirty-kneed pants, pudding-stained sweaters and crayon-smudged dresses (although most of that ends up in her mouth – Mads loves a good crayon-y snack).

I’m not the best housekeeper, I admit. People have called me a lot of things, but to my best recollection “domestic goddess” has not been one of them. I tidy up by moving the clutter from one place (living room floor) to another (bedroom closet). I don’t actually dust so much as I blow on surfaces hard enough to scatter the debris. But at the same time I don’t live a slovenly existence. The dishes get washed, the floors get vacuumed, the oven gets cleaned (okay, that’s pushing it). But I just cannot seem to keep on top of the never-ending piles of dirty clothes. There are baskets of things waiting to be washed, baskets of things waiting to be dried, baskets of things waiting to be folded and put away, only to be worn again and have the entire awful process start all over again.

Thank goodness I have a husband with progressive ideas on the division of household labour (not to mention a low tolerance for mess in general – can you say OCD?). Well, I’ll do the cooking and he can do the cleaning up. Sounds like a fair trade to me!