When you reach adulthood there are a lot of perks, but also a few unpleasant things that smack you in the head on a regular basis. For example, who in their right mind likes to pay bills? Do your taxes? Think about the need for life insurance? I've wracked my brain trying to make these grown-up things fun but I've come up empty.
Near the top of my list of "Things I'd rather not spend my free time doing" are household chores. They get done around here, but never with a smile or a song. More than once I've wished that I had the love for cleaning that drove the character of Monica on Friends. I think it would be refreshing to crave scrubbing the tub the way I crave chocolate.
Now that we are a family of three, the list of chores has grown along with the love. Since No. 3 isn't sitting up yet, we can't exactly expect him to sweep floors or wash his dishes. And since we are his parents we can't exactly cry, "No fair!" that he makes the most laundry but does the least. The only way this is going to work without dread is to make it as fun and painless as possible and to remember that we are lucky to have Little One around to make the extra laundry.
As far as making the chore easier, we settled on a few key habits that we are in the process of learning. First, I start a load of the Little One's laundry as soon as I wake up. We move that load over to the dryer an hour later so that it is done drying before we leave for work. Since the Little One's clothes are tiny and don't need to look well-pressed at daycare, they can sit in the dryer all day.
Second,we wash all of our work clothes together in loads separate from everything else. We learned this trick after we got an energy-efficient washer and noticed that The Husband's wrinkle-free clothes were coming out of the dryer very wrinkled. Our washer saves energy because clothes are treated to an extra long spin cycle, making them drier when they come out of the washer. This means less time and heat in the dryer. The problem is that dress shirts and pants sold as wrinkle-free require a certain amount of moisture when they get to the dryer in order for the fabric to dry smoothly. Instead of running these clothes on the energy-efficient cycle we bounce back to a basic permanent press level to get the job done. As long as we hang them up as soon as they are dry the trick works. We've been known to forget this last step, so by bundling all of the dress clothes together we only have to remember to immediately answer the call of the dryer buzzer a couple of times each week.
The biggest challenge for us is putting our clean and folded laundry away. While it's great to have a big surface to fold the laundry on, we also have the bad habit of leaving it on that same big surface for days. This is where we need the biggest push. The bottom line is that, in addition to making our lives easier by staying organized and on top of these household jobs, we are also trying to set an example for the Little One. So, crazy as it sounds, I just hung a picture of the little guy on the wall above the laundry room table as a reminder to suck it up and put our clothes away. I'm sure some day he'll roll his eyes at the fact that it hangs on the wall and at that point he'll be big enough to take it down himself. But, hey, that also means he'll probably be old enough to do his own laundry.
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