Open Line Saturday...

One of the questions I often face as the mother of a large family is "how do you keep up with the laundry?" and depending on the size of Mount Everest in my laundry room I either evade the question or I answer it.

Currently I do have a small mountain of laundry growing in the laundry area but that is, in part, the fault of my two oldest sons. One son just finished up a semester in college and, I suspect, looking at his own private Mount Everest; decided he would come home for a brief visit before moving into an apartment with friends. At any rate, I woke one morning last week to find not one but two sons asleep on the couches in the living room. Both the washer and dyer were going with several baskets of dirty clothes stacked across the laundry area. The other son who had just moved home so as to be able to save some money while continuing his studies at the local community college, also had several mounds of laundry heaped in that area.

Typically though, we have a system. Each child knows his or her day of the week for laundry. Now if you do the math - you quickly see that I have more children then there are days of the week - so how, you might well ask, does that work? I guess I would be more correct in saying that I have groups of children assigned to days of the week with older children getting a whole day to them self. (Is that grammatically correct?) And these groups are largely determined by who shares a room together. Now if a child (or worse a roomful) misses a day - Wednesday is free - except that we are usually away on that day... so it is a little difficult to utilize that day. None the less, it has been done. If need be - one can resort to begging, and/or bribing, to be allowed to do a small load on someone else's wash day. My dream is to one day own two washers and two dryers... but that will likely remain a dream. But one needs dreams - right?

The one dilemma that constantly tripped me up though was that of towels. I could never keep up with towels. Especially in the summer when some of the younger children might take a dip in the tub several times a day. I have finally resolved that problem. But for that solution you will have to tune in - next Saturday.