Laundry Again
/Today is a determined laundry day. I'm highly motivated. Michael will be home later tonight. With all. his. stuff. He's finished, a brand new college graduate. And I'm guessing he's not bringing home clean clothes. Paddy will be home the beginning of next week. Last time, he brought home 37 pounds of laundry. He has no laundry facilities at school and is required to pay to send it out. A dollar a pound. He doesn't launder all that regularly.
And, I'm making up beds in that room that will soon be full of my big boys. I'm looking so forward to having them home there, even though I know there will be an inevitable fight over the top bunk. Still, it matters to me how the bed looks and feels that first night home. Patrick's Facebook status just a few hours after he arrived here for Thanksgiving was "My own bed:-)" How that made me smile! He appreciated that bed.
But I'm doing laundry today and I'm not blogging. Instead, I leave you with my laundry and linen thoughts from a few years ago. Happy washing!
It's clean sheet night. I love clean sheet night. My friend Denise reminded me not too long ago that I have had a thing for bedding since I was a little girl. When I first began to babysit, I made 50 cents an hour. Denise and I had quite a little business going there in Navy housing in Charleston, S.C. I saved my quarters until I could buy a $28 dollar quilt from the Sears catalog. I still remember that quilt. It was the beginning of a lifelong romance with linens. I love a well-made bed. There's something about the feel of cool cottons in the summer and warm flannels in the winter. There's something about the way a change of sheets can change a sickbed into a bed of recovery. And oh, the way a quilt can lend personality to a room! I do love beds. I love towels, too. Big, fluffy, super-absorbent towels that wrap the delicious dimples of damp babies after baths. Linens are truly lovely.
Laundry hampers full of dirty clothes? Not so much. The reality is that I spend far more time in my life tending to the latter than the former. Sheets get washed once a week. Towels, twice a week. The rest of the laundry is a never-ending hymn sung from that narrow room off the kitchen. Maryan asked about laundry and I'll share a bit here, but really, I know that my laundry system won't be her laundry system. Laundry is one of those tasks every woman must think through for herself. The biggest key, however, is simple and universal (and much like refrigerator cleaning): just do it.
Laundry is a big deal. This is evidenced by the fact the Cheryl Mendelson devotes 200 pages to the topic in Home Comforts--far more than any of us really need to know. What we must know first is that care of clothing and linens must be woven into the day. Let's begin with the end. A dirty boy at the end of a day of play wearing mud-stained clothes is ready to disrobe and take a bath. Where will he put his clothes? In my husband's childhood home, he'd drop them on the floor just outside the bath and they'd magically appear in a drawer, clean and folded before he awakened the next morning. I still can't quite figure out that magic. In our house, it makes sense to have a hampers in the bathrooms. There is one for lights, for darks, for towels, and for Daddy. I like to keep Mike's clothing separate from the mix because he's frequently packing and unpacking and it just works better not to have his clothes tangled up with everyone else's.
Everyone but Karoline knows how to sort into the right hampers. I know there are folks who can't be bothered by sorting. But I likes my whites to look white, my pinks to be pink on purpose, and my colors to stay colorful. By setting up the hampers this way, we bring a little order to the laundry before the process is really begun.
When I launder is very much affected by the reality that our hot water heater is too small for the needs of our family. So, I have to wash at times when no one will need a bath or shower and no dishes will need to be washed. But I can't fold at those times because I'm either busy with the school day or I'm out of the house. [See I told you my system makes sense for me, but is unlikely to be used as is by someone else.] I wash and dry when water is available. I fold without fail every single morning, before everyone is awake and often again in the evening. I need to wash, dry , and put away at least two loads of laundry a day to stay afloat, sometimes three. This includes cloth diapers, linens and a never-ending number of sports uniforms. Rebecca suggested to me that it would be a good idea to have all the sports uniforms in their own box in the laundry room. I'd wash them, dry them, and return them there. They'd never get into circulation with the rest of the clothes. This idea appeals to me and I'm working on a way to implement it. In a smaller family, it is inefficient to do laundry every day. I do laundry every day because I have the full loads to make it efficient. If you don't have full loads, it's more efficient to wait until you do.
It is possible to do small amounts of laundry several times a week or every day. This system actually tends to work best in large, highly organized households, particularly those in which someone stays home to keep house. But it tends to be adopted, as a kind of default system, in more disorganized households where no one stays home. Frequent laundering geared to need of the day makes it hard to get properly sorted and balanced loads. Besides, this method never gives one a sense of repose, freedom from an accomplished chore. (Home Comforts)
If you live in a large family, you might feel as if this job is never finished. But if you have a system for it, you can reach the end of the day knowing that you have fulfilled the duties necessary to the day. Until the day everyone goes naked all day, this is as close as you're going to come to finishing the laundry. If you are facing Mount Never-rest and it looms formidably in front of you, begin with the jeans. Pull them all out of piles and wash them all at once. These are big and bulky and will give you a jumpstart. Then move to towels-- again they take up a lot of space in the hamper but they are so easy to wash, dry and put away!
When I fold, I take out of circulation anything I think is past its usefulness or state of good repair. I keep a giveaway bag in the laundry room for this purpose. I match socks as I can and toss the inevitable unmatched socks into the sock basket for matching later. My husband is great about pairing his socks and turning them down at the top to keep them together before putting them in the watch. Most of my children are not so good at this. I put ironing into a basket of its own to be done on Thursdays. I fold everything else into baskets according to bedroom. The big kid in the bedroom is in charge of putting them away. I put away my clothes, my husband's clothes, and the 
baby's clothes.
Before January, the only time I'd used my ironing board was when I inverted it against my bed and laid on it nine months pregnant to try to get a breech baby to turn (didn't work, by the way). This was not good for the ironing board. It was also five and a half years ago. From that time on, I ironed on occasion if necessary on my bed or wherever. My husband has a vast collection of very nice shirts. When my uncle died six years ago, Mike inherited all three of his wardrobes. My uncle had amazing style-sense and these were all wonderful clothes which fit Mike perfectly. Wonderful, very high maintenance clothes. I used to take all his shirts to the cleaners. In January, Mary Beth's dance teacher asked her to add another class. In an effort to find some discretionary income and not impact the budget, I eliminated the cleaners and added ironing to my regular routine. And I found that I pretty much like it. Ironing on a regular basis is different from the kind of ironing I used to do. Taking the time to smooth the wrinkles is really rather satisfying. Trying to iron while someone stands in front of me in his underwear, shifting from one foot to another while glancing nervously at the clock is not at all satisfying. It's really rather maddening and not a little guilt-inducing. Better to do it on a regular basis. Ironing is great thinking time. My hands are engaged but my mind is free to roam. I find myself thinking about the people who wear the clothes I iron and I often am inspired to pray for them during that time. Margaret Peterson writes that ironing "requires attention but not thought and so leaves the heart free to meditate on whatever comes to mind, all the while hands go through the familiar steps involved in turning wrinkly things into smooth things" (Keeping Home). I have also found that when I iron on a new ironing board and I use scented ironing spray (or linen water), I get the unexpected benefit of scenting our whole room for several hours. The hot iron makes a sweet-smelling steam and I'm all about aromatherapy!
When I first broke free from my habit of taking clothes out to the cleaners, I was encouraged and somewhat emboldened by Cheryl Mendelson's assertion that "commercial laundries do not do nearly as good a job as you can at home, cause much faster wearing and fading of clothes and linens, and will rarely give the individual attention to cherished garments or expensive linens that you will" (Home Comforts). And all this time I thought "the cleaners" were so much superior to what I could do!
Putting clothes away was a major chore before the mighty purge. We simply did not have room for the clothing and linens we had. The linen closet was so jammed full that a child would throw himself against it to get it to close and the hinge was broken from the force. No more. 42 bags later, we have no more clothes or linens than we have room to store neatly. There are very few sheets in the linen closet now. I have one set of summer sheets for each bed and one extra per mattress size. I recently had a chance to test whether this would work during an illness and I'm happy to report we all did just fine. In the autumn, I will add a set of flannel sheets per bed. On sheet changing day each week, I wash and dry the sheets and put them back on the bed. Towels are stored in the linen closet or hung on hooks in the bathroom. Colleen passed along a tip she'd read on the message board: put all the sheets sets inside a pillowcase. You can tell at a glance which sheets are which, the sets are all together and there are no messy edges from the fitted sheets. I truly love this tip and I loved it even more in the middle of the night when I needed to change sickbed sheets!
Laundry is critical to the smooth running of my home. I can't tell you the tears I've shed because someone was packing and I didn't know where the "whatever" was. I remember being reprimanded by a referee when my child wore the wrong color socks with his uniform. The color matters. It's no fun being a bad soccer mom. And I've noticed that as the laundry goes, so goes the rest of my house. I'm not sure whether it's the chicken or the egg, but it does bear itself out time after time. If I let the laundry slide, everything else is sliding, too. Better, instead, to do it well.
What I See Washing Up
/Leila is hosting a Kitchen Sink Party. She writes:
Well, I'll tell you. Over the years I've noticed that many women do get the idea that they would like to stay home and take care of their family. They feel torn away when they leave home, as if a part of them gets left behind -- and that feeling is far stronger for them than the feeling they have when they leave the outside world and feel a little torn about that. I think most people understand that you can't have everything, and they make a choice.
But many of these same women do go just a teensy bit insane (and I say this because I was sort of this way myself, although I had no outside life I cared anything about at all) when they stay home.
And part of that insanity is that it is truly difficult to live somewhere that's probably far from anyone you know or are related to, have no friends who are willing to do what you are doing, and spend all your time with small children when you don't feel very well to start with. I understand all that, believe me!
Part of it, though, has to do with not understanding or not being willing to commit yourself to the little tasks that make up this life.
I think she's spot-on. Mothering at home, making a home is all about commiting to the little things. When I say "I love my kitchen," I mean I love all the things my kitchen means for me and for my family. I love the time we spend there cooking together. I love the quiet moments in the early morning when it is all mine and I bring it to life for the day. I love the sense of satisfaction I get when everything is buttoned up at night and I put it to sleep. It is physically in the center of my house (something I really don't love), but it's also the emotional center of our home. During the day, the kitchen is the hub.
My kitchen sink overlooks the sunroom where we do most of our "schooling." Beyond the sunroom is a big backyard. I use the ledge above the sink to store art supplies--crayons, paints, pencils. It is an ever-chaning landscape because those jars are constantly in motion. Someone is using something every waking hour. There are four tiny bud vases. From April until November, Karoline keeps them filled with roses from our garden. Now, we've filled them with holly and evergreen.
I notice how badly we need to re-caulk...hmmm...
One more shot:
And now, I'm off to wake my kitchen.
Happy Saturday! Visit Leila for a Kitchen Sink Party.
People, Look East
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Guest post by Mary Beth
NItty Gritty Rhythm
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This post is ridiculously long, but it answers lots of the nitty-gritty questions I get regarding how we juggle a really busy sports schedule, a traveling dad, and many kids over a big age span. If you hang in there and read, the answers are here. I wrote it several weeks ago and decided to hold it because there was too much detail about our daily whereabouts. Soccer season is coming to a close now, though, so it will all change.
Last summer, in the days before the feast of St. Anne, I offered a heartfelt (desperate?) novena. I so needed her intercession in the matter of my daily and weekly rhythm. Some of you might recall that when I wrote about the struggle I was having with burnout and exhaustion as a result of demands on my time, I offered no possible solutions. I didn’t even try. I crashed at the end of soccer season last spring and had no energy to figure anything out. Instead, I took comfort in the fact that summer would offer respite.
For as long as I’ve had children to ferry to and fro, my father-in-love has been willing and eager to help me whenever I had conflicts. Sadly, he is no longer well enough to play that role in our lives. He cannot pop over a pick up and deliver a child, cannot stay home with little ones if all the big ones have to be in different places. He cannot come fix this or that in my house when Mike is away or busy. He can’t do the late night or early morning run to the airport. He just can’t do it. When the day came last spring that that decision was made, I felt the rug yanked out from under me. All these years he’s been my go-to guy, the secret ingredient that made this crazy life more sane. I had no idea how much I depended on knowing there was a safety net until there wasn’t one. I struggled both with the fact that it rocked my world and with the intense sadness I felt for him and for us as we watch him decline.
When the time came to offer a novena in preparation for St. Anne’s feast, I recognized that the summer was half over and that very soon, I was going to have to revisit the dreaded SCHEDULE. No one on earth was going to rescue me. And I knew well that I could not figure this one out on my own.
I didn’t know how I was going to make the drive to where the boys play soccer in McLean (a good 45 minutes in traffic, a bad hour or more in heavy traffic) and get Mary Beth to ballet. I knew Christian would get himself where he needed to be, but that also meant he couldn’t help with anyone else. And when US Soccer plucked Patrick from the mix, that meant that it was a lot less likely that one teenager would remain home to care for little ones. It was going to be all of us driving, all the time. I worried that my little ones were lacking in play time and in time to make friends (particularly homeschooling friends). I worried I’d never have time to write. I just worried and worried.
And St. Anne heard it all. The plan presented itself to me in ways I could not imagine.
I get so many notes asking how to fit it all in, when to cook dinner, how to make sure family meals happen. This post is full of details and chances are your eyes will glaze over, but I offer it for the handful of people who are looking for just such details. More importantly, I offer it as a testimony to the power of prayer.
Let’s start on Monday morning. Dinner is prepped and put in the Dutch oven first thing. The day is going to lurch forward full speed ahead. If dinner isn’t ready to go before 10AM, we’re not going to eat. The rest of Monday morning is just the basics, school-wise (Reading, Bible and math), and then thorough cleaning of the house, with particular attention to the wood floors on the main level. Then we shove all the furniture out of the way to transform our home into a ballet studio.
When I could not figure a way to give ballet lessons (or any lessons) to my little girls because the times conflicted with everyone else and with retrieving Gracie from school and it was way too expensive, Mary Beth and her friend Mary Kate stepped in. Ballet is now in my dining room, sunroom, kitchen and family room, every Monday afternoon. It doesn’t cost me anything and there are 15 (18?—I’ve lost count) other homeschooled girls to share the experience with Katie and Karoline. Now, my only problem is how to keep Katie from talking the whole time. So many friends, so little chat time.
While the girls dance, the boys play flag football with a whole bunch of other homeschooled boys. My friend and neighbor Mary Chris is the genius behind the very lowkey opportunity for good, old fashioned fun. Marisa comes out for football and ballet and she brings her little guy, my godson, Johnny. If you had told me in July that Marisa and I would have a chance to chat in person once a week, I would have been astonished. Also present for this golden hour is my friend Bonnie, with whom I used to walk for an hour every day. We go way back and I’m so blessed to be able to have time again on a regular basis to just bask in the warm glow of friendship.
After ballet and football, Becca, one of the moms whose son is on Nicholas’ soccer team, hustles the boys to practice. Christian takes Mary Beth to her dance class and goes on to his practice. I gather the girls, mine and Becca’s, and meet her at soccer practice a little while later. They all play in the park near the practice field. And I absolutely, positively luxuriate in lots and lots of conversation with a bright, faithful mother of many who also homeschools and is a fellow graduate of my alma mater. This is a rare blessing for which I am so very grateful. Now, I eagerly look forward to those Monday afternoons. (And we do it again on Thursdays, too.) My kids don’t whine about being dragged along to practice—instead they look forward to meeting their friends in the park. When it’s all over, we go home to dinner in the Dutch oven and I fall into bed in time for Monday Night Football. I’ve yet to make it past half time.
Tuesday is a bit more relaxed. Same long drive to practice, but this time I do it only with Stephen. Mary Beth and/or Christian are home with wee ones. I sit at the field with my laptop and write while he trains. There’s no wi-fi in the parking lot, but that’s a good thing. It’s writing time only; there’s no temptation to surf. Mary Beth and I prep dinner before I leave and she finishes off the cooking while I'm at training with Stephen. We eat when Stephen and I get home, which is just about when Mike gets home, too.
Wednesdays are crazy but again an unexpected blessing finds us. I make dinner really early on Wednesdays and pack two meals in bento boxes. I take both Stephen and Nick with me for the long drive (all these long drives are “read aloud” time and we are cranking through our reading list on audio). I drop Nicky at his training and take Stephen with me to Starbucks. He eats his dinner, we chat, and then he reads and I write. Then, I take Stephen to practice, pick up Nick and repeat the process with a different child. At the end of the day, they’ve both had time alone with me. We’ve talked about books, maybe surfed a little together and just hung out a bit.
And on a recent Wednesday, when Nick’s training was canceled, but Stephen’s wasn’t, I discovered that I could drop Stephen a wee bit early and make it to a nearby (and beautiful) church for Adoration and confession.
Thursdays, both boys train again. Becca’s family arrives a little early for the practice time they share with Nick and they hang out with us during some of Stephen’s training, too. Have I mentioned how happy I am to have such good company? Thursday nights we eat dinner at the park. When Stephen is finished, I have just enough time to hustle to pick up Mary Beth. We get home really late and roll right into bed.
Fridays, we got nothin’. We stay home all day and love it.
Saturday mornings find me dropping Mary Beth at ballet and taking just the little girls grocery shopping. This is new for them. Ever since Michael learned to drive, I’ve avoided grocery shopping with little ones. When Michael was at home, he did with a very detailed list. Then, Christian did it for a while. Then, I’d drop Patrick off, let him do it and go back and pick him up after dropping girls at ballet.
Now, I actually look forward to the Saturday routine. I take my little girls to Whole Foods. We shop there and have breakfast. We poke our way through the craft store. Then, we go to Costco and finish out our shopping. By that time, it’s time to pick up Mary Beth. It’s an unexpectedly happy thing. Who knew I’d ever like running errands? Not me
Just before Patrick left, we were shopping together. I bought a bag for my laptop and the boys dubbed it my “McLean office.” It’s true, that my work is only being done in fits and spurts in the car and at Starbucks while waiting out soccer practice in McLean. I have a schedule for meeting deadlines, but the reality is that there are fewer deadlines and much less writing because there is much less time to do it. But there is time to do it. God blesses the time there is.
Of course, as I write (in the car on a Tuesday), the light is waning quickly. I know that fading light this early in the evening means that all the times will shift soon and the schedule will change. I am not nearly as afraid of that as I once was.
It’s only time. In the end, God is in control of time. And when I hand it to Him, in all humility, He provides abundantly to meet my needs and to bless my diligence.
