Washed Out

January has come and gone... again. Oh and February too. Crazy. Every year I think that this is the year I am finally going to master the art of doing the laundry. Every year I fail. I always think of some innovative system or some new way of motivating myself or a way of making it faster somehow. So far, this year, I've gotten the laundry room completely organized with little color coded and labeled clean laundry baskets. Super. Getting the laundry into the clean laundry baskets is the easy part. I'm capable of running the laundry and last year I mastered the art of sorting it into the clean baskets but that's as far as it goes. We get clean clothes to wear out of those baskets and then put them in the dirty basket at the end of the day (or on the floor, no one's perfect). That's right. We live in wrinkly basket clothes all the time. My idea this year was to get the boys involved and have them be more responsible for their laundry, which has been a goal since the twins were three. Anyway, we had our first laundry success. All of the laundry got folded and put away in drawers and in closets. It was glorious. It was miraculous. It was short-lived. The next morning, Tobias was looking for some clean clothes to wear for the day. (He has strong opinions for a two-year-old about fashion.) He came to me, upset, because there were no clothes in his laundry basket. Excitedly I showed him all of his clothes were neatly folded in his drawers! In his room! Isn't that amazing?!? He looked confused but he picked out pants and a shirt and I helped him get dressed. Then, while I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I turned around to see Tobias with an armload of laundry marching into the laundry room. I followed him to find that he had already made several trips and had relocated all of his clean and folded clothes back to his laundry basket. After all, that is where they have been his entire life and so that is where they must belong. I feel like I have failed my son, like our house is some oddity in the fabric of civilization where people don't even know what drawers are for. (Mother, what these "drawers" of which you speak?) Yep, it's official. When it comes to laundry, I'm a wash-out. And don't even ask my children about the iron and ironing board. They'd probably tell you they're decorative objects. You know, like dressers.