Here’s this week’s published confession. Enjoy.
“Sometimes I’m a really crappy laundress.
So Saturday I played Awesome Wife and gave my sweet husband the green light to spend the day at sporting events. He left at eight am and didn’t get home until eleven. I? I stayed home with the kids.
With the usual laundry piles on my list of Things I Really Don’t Want to Do on a Saturday, I put in a load of whites early in the morning.
Then I promptly forgot about them.
On Saturdays, I kind of feel like I shouldn’t have to do all the monotonous weekday stuff. And with the Saturday task master out of the picture, I ended up spending a large amount of the day dosing the kids with Red Box movies and surfing the internet to check out Christmas prices on toys. I also might have bought myself a pair of boots, but it’s all so foggy I can’t be sure.
(Okay, we did take a field trip to Walmart for tulip bulbs, then I let June, Rex, and Rex’s animal friends help me plant them.This took a small eternity. Animals don’t have thumbs–it makes for a very lengthy planting process.)
That night, after putting the kids to bed, I realized that in order to look like the day hadn’t been a complete waste, and to make sure my sweetheart knew just how much I had “sacrificed” on his behalf, I would probably be smart to spend an hour cleaning up the debris. You would not believe how trashed a house can get when Mother just doesn’t care.
As I was turning out the lights for bed, I realized that the whites from 14 hours ago were still in the washer. Lifting the lid, I was more than a little suspicious that they needed to be run through again.
But I was tired, and that would mean I had to stay up even later, and that would mean I’d get less sleep before the baby woke me up, and…you know where this is going. I poked around a little, sniffed here and there, and finally just plopped them in the dryer. I added a huge wad of dryer sheets, to mask the must, and went to bed, feeling just a little bit guilty.
This morning, Mr. Clean was getting ready for work. He pulled on his undershirt, and immediately frowned.
“What the…?? Has this even been washed? This thing reeks!” he looked in his drawer and finally deduced that every shirt he picked up had the same not-so-fresh scent.
I gulped, grabbed a nearby shirt, gave it a good sniff (yikes!) and blatantly lied. “Really? I think it smells fine. Must be those dryer sheets, I’ll pick up some new ones. Whoops! Looks like the baby’s crying, gotta go!” I said, evacuating the scene of the crime faster than you can say Oxyclean.
And that is just another installment in How to Be a Really Crappy Laundress, 101.”
I would have done the exact same thing! Which is why Adam does most of the laundry.
That’s happened so many times with our towels that I might as well just go buy some new ones! lol. My lesson on being a really crappy laundress (which happened this past week) was to accidentally (meaning, “on purpose, but I didn’t know it would turn out so horribly”) put a new yellow dress in with our whites. Oh yeah, all of our whites are now yellows. I didn’t want to put the stupid dress with darks, because I didn’t want it to turn dark. And I don’t have a load of yellows to put it in with….well, I guess now I do.
I’ve done similar. Actually I remember going home from college for a visit & having one of my sisters admire my colored bra. What I didn’t tell her was that I had accidentally put a maroon colored sundress in w/ the whites. I had the purtiest underwear ever.
This exact story seems to happen to me on a weekly basis. I forget about the laundry all the time. And with C out of town this week, I’ve had that I don’t care attitude all week. I have until Sunday to make repairs.
oh but i DO know what the place can turn into when mom doesn’t care! lol.
i can’t handle the mildewy smell, so that rarely happens with me. but i ignore laundry period, regularly cause i HATE doing it! so often mr. LKP has to do it.
when i DO do it (snicker), i’m pretty good about it (after all my dad has been the maytag man my whole life, and so if i screwed up laundry i’d have him to deal with)….except in the middle of my massive sickness a couple weeks back, i tossed together sweats….forgetting that i had a BRAND NEW scarlet colored aeropostale hoodie in there as well. too bad miss scarlet destroyed all other colors in the wash, INCLUDING miss apple green hoodie (also from aeropostale) that is my absolute favorite. the whole load looked like i’d done it in a rusty old oil barrel! i cried & cried, and washed & rewashed with color-safe bleach and every trick under the sun….to no avail. so my trashed green hoodie has been demoted to the camping clothes tote, and i cringe whenever i pull miss scarlet on. it’s a sad, sad story. highly traumatic. even more reason i should ALWAYS ignore laundry, and just replenish our wardrobes from the store every month!
When this happens again, rewash all the clothes in Biz before you dry them. I washed whites with a green dish towel once and tried the Biz and got my whites back.(Minus the green dish towel) Good luck to you.
I have done exactly the same thing with the same results!! The good news is that my husband now washes the clothes and puts them on the bed for me to fold and put away. But hey, at least they don’t stink!!!
Been there, too. In fact, I think I have some stuff in the washer right now that I forgot about……………
…………..checking……….
Yup. But my solution is to add fabric softener and turn on the 2nd rinse. 7 minutes and they’ll be ready for the dryer.
My only question is has your mother ever forgotten a load? Cause I have to guess no. I think there are just some people it never happens to. Helps to have a laundry room right off of a main room though, annoying noise, but helpful. Love the article though. Sometimes I wonder at how you can turn a normal Saturday night into a column. You are genius I think.
I’m a fanatic about not having the stinky whites. But if I leave my kids in charge of moving the laundry, then I end up with the double problem of them not moving it until just before I get home, and my only discovering their neglect when I pull out a towel to dry off after a bath. There’s nothing like feeling STINKIER when you get OUT of the shower than when you went IN!
I used to have this problem too – until I got me a new front load washer. It seems that the new machine rinses much more thoroughly, so the clothes are cleaner when they’re done.
So Maybe…. you’re not such a crappy laundress. Maybe you just need better equipment. And what luck — Christmas is coming! Cha Ching!!!
ManOfTheHouse is a little neurotic about the clothes in the washer not sitting for more than 1/2 an hour… he swears he can smell it.
Shh… don’t tell him that on a regular basis they sit for 4 to 5 hours and he hasn’t noticed yet.
14 might be pushing it though…
I. HATE. LAUNDRY.
I hate it when that happens! A second rinse with some baking soda usually takes care of it…not sure about that long though!