I know, blogging about laundry is one of the most droll topics in the world and quite possibly worse to suffer through than hemorrhoids, but before you roll your eyes even further, just wait a moment. I need help. I'm in a serious situation here. There is... I can't... I'm... I'm desperate. I'm drowning. Laundry seems to have been dumped upon our house like a snow bomb. I don't know where it's come from, but I'm almost tempted to roll it up into balls and throw it at the kids while shouting "snowball fight!" (Or in truth, while shouting "do your own bloody laundry for crying out loud I'm over it!")
I had a horrific nightmare on the weekend that the children were crying out for me and I couldn't reach them. I was trapped in a pitch black room, completely disorientated and something had tangled me up so I couldn't break free.
Then the Lad flicked on the bedroom light and I realised in my sleep-groggy state that the children were crying out for me and I really was tangled up - in washing!
I had slept through Guy Smiley calling out for me through the monitor at 3am.
I slept through him crying for me.
I slept through the Lily Bug waking and joining in the chorus of "Muuum! Mummy where you?!"
Then when their increasingly-frantic voices finally switched me into middle-of-the-night autopilot mode, I jumped to my feet and veered off in the wrong direction.
The dirty washing mountain had avalanched through the night so that it was no longer contained behind the bedroom door but in fact sprawled across the floor.
It disorientated me.
To make matters worse, I was so half-asleep, I wasn't even sure at that point what room I was in (Hell. The room I was in was called Hell.) and I kept trying to head towards the sounds of the kids through the baby monitor rather than the actual door on the opposite wall.
Truly, it was a horrific unnerving experience.
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| Note sarcasm about that 'otherwise immaculate house'... |
Now normally, in the ideal world, nice neat laundry lives in a dresser or a wardrobe (or so I've been told.) And this is the conundrum we've arrived at: When we have more damp or dirty washing than we have neat and clean, where does it all go?
There are five of us in this house (excluding cats), we don't have a drier, and although winter has been fairly mild for us so far, Murphy's Law dictates that every time I try to hang washing on the line - even if it's a fine winter day - the clouds will smash together and dump water onto my nice clean laundry. Not because it's winter and that's what clouds do, but because I pissed off a Pagan Rain God, and I don't even know why.
The drying rack in the lounge is buckling beneath the weight of one load of towels, one school uniform, as many socks and undies as I could find amid the wreckage of the bedroom.The changeable weather has me darting in and out the door, hanging out washing then whipping it back in again at the sign of a shower until I feel like a human yoyo. (We had a thunderstorm this morning, then clear blue sky for most of the afternoon, then a sudden shower. FML!)
I'm down to my last clean pair of underwear. I've worn the same pair of jeans for four days straight. I haven't seen the Lad in over 24 hours but I did hear muffled screams yesterday and in hindsight, I think he may have been buried alive in the washing pile behind our bedroom door. And if that's the case. It's too late for him now. There were far too many of his rotten old socks in that pile for anyone to have survived the toxic fumes.
So as you can see, we're hitting crisis level here, and it won't be long until the house itself is buried and our family will be nothing but a history lesson for future school children. Kind of like the people of Te Wairoa. But without the volcanic eruption.
[Edited to add: Look at how much I have managed to write on the subject of LAUNDRY for crying out loud?! I need to get out of the house more...]
