Just Air it Out!

One thing I just cannot figure out in my house is laundry. How is it possible that we do so much laundry? I am not exaggerating here, we average a load of laundry every single day. Add in the sheets and towels on Saturday and it’s up to multiple loads in a day.

Here’s the big problem with laundry: folding. Back when there was nothing but adults, you had big articles that filled the machine and you fold them. Now you’ve got a load that is the same size, but three times as many small articles. The effort to fold a small clothing item is the same as a big clothing, but twice as many fit in the washing machine. Now my daily past-time is folding.

Another problem: We’re also constantly running clothes either overnight or while we are at work (or, we had good intentions of finishing the laundry in the evening and we fell asleep). That means that clothes sit around for a long time and get wrinkly. That means a lot more ironing – ironing clothes that you used to not have to iron – and a lot more time wearing wrinkly polos. This has done wonders for my professional appearance (and career prospects no doubt).

The great mystery is: How is it that the kids can generate more than one day’s worth of clothes in a day? I swear that, in that load of laundry every day, there are multiple outfits for each child. Plus there are always things like jammies and bathing suits to help round out a load.

Actually, I know where all the laundry comes from. It’s their mother, who oddly enough feels like they should actually wear clean clothes. We’ll go to an activity at a friend’s house in the evening and she’ll want to put the kids in a new set of clean clothes. This is obviously nuts, since the “activity” seems to usually mean to “roll around in the mud” (Cody, when playing outside, can be relied on to find whatever may exist and put himself face-down into it; Chiara isn’t much better).

Instead, I think Andrea should employ a strategy from my days in the college dorm: grode clothes. You may remember the bonfire at Texas A&M before the terrible accident (I graduated the year before). Your “grodes” were the clothes you wore to the site where you cut the bonfire firewood. Your beloved dorm mates would do their best to make sure your grodes got as dirty as possible – not just with mud and the like, but preferably with whip cream and maple syrup as well.

Grode clothes were never washed. They were just hung out of your dorm window to dry out. Come to think of it, that was pretty much our cleaning philosophy for everything in the dorm room – just air it out. It was the cleaning equivalent of Hakuna Matata – and trust me we had “no worries” when it came to the cleanliness of our dorm. That this philosophy ran contrary to our primary goal of attracting female mates never occurred to us.

But therein lies the solution. The kids aren’t trying to attract mates at this point. Andrea and I aren’t either (you can tell as much by my wrinkly polos). So the kids can get their clothes as grodey as they want, and we can confidently bring them to whatever activities that may come our way.

For those of you who might invite us over but would prefer not to have two grodey kids tracking maple syrup on your living room carpet, just remember this tried-and-true technique for cleaning from Texas A&M’s Dunn Hall: Just Air It Out! Hakuna Matata!