Laun-dreams

You guys. Something absolutely amazing happened to me over the weekend.

Something I fantasize about on a daily basis, and dream about at night.

Something that has never happened before.

I caught up on my laundry.

I. Caught up. On my laundry.

*stands on a mountaintop with arms outstretched* I CAUGHT UP ON MY LAUNDRY!!!!

Just let the enormity of that sink in for a minute: every single piece, washed, dried, folded, and put away. Washer and dryer and hamper and basket ... empty.

It's a practically mythical phenomenon around these parts, since there's a grand total of six wardrobes in my house to keep clean. I have yet to figure out how my kids go through so many clothes, since they're naked every time I turn around - but as most of my fellow moms can attest, kids have an unparalleled knack for filling up a hamper.*

*And by "filling up a hamper" I mean "throwing the clothes down wherever the hell they happen to take them off.

Washing isn't the problem. I could wash clothes all day. We generate so much laundry around here that I have to do at least one load daily, sometimes two.*

*Especially if I try to take a day off and accidentally leave a load in the washer and it starts to smell funky so I have to wash it twice. Oops.

And drying it? Simple. Transfer clothes from washer to dryer. Easy-peasy. I don't mind at all.

But there's no magic laundry fairy who takes your clean clothing from dryer to drawer. And when it stops being easy, I start being disinterested in doing it. So once the laundry is actually dry, it sometimes sits there wrinkling in the dryer. And then I'm like, "I'll just throw this next load in on top of it and dry the whole thing together." And then that sits, until finally my dryer is too full to accommodate anything else and then I'm left with this ...

... a.k.a. the unfortunate reality that a ton of laundry-folding is in my future. Blah.

And then once it's folded, it has to be put away. Most of my kids are old enough to put their own stuff in their own drawers, but their handiwork tends to look like this ...

 This is their pajama drawer, where I don't care if anything is folded or not.

So when it matters whether their stuff is wrinkled, I put it away myself, which is why their shirt drawer looks like this:

This is a very smart method of putting clothes away (thank you Pinterest!). Number one, you don't have to sift through stacks of shirts to find the one you want. And because your kids don't either, it stays organized a lot longer than normal.

Man, I love Internet wisdom.

Anyway, yesterday I did ALL the laundry and put it ALL away and stood back and just stared in awe at the beautifully empty laundry room. I swear there was a Hallelujah chorus.

And then? I went upstairs and found an entire outfit crumpled behind my kids' bathroom door.

And on my way to throw it downstairs, my husband was like, "Oh, you're on your way to the laundry room? Take this dish rag because it's starting to smell musty."

And then my oldest son was like, "Ewww, who threw their dirty socks in the toy box?"

It was like the universe said, "Caught up on laundry, eh? We'll just see about that."

At least I don't have to, like, beat it on a rock and hang it on a clothesline. It could be worse.