Laundry: This feels like a confession.

Last night, I decided I needed to tackle the laundry splashed about our home. I have this bad habit of washing clothes, drying them, and then lying them flat so they won't wrinkle...but never HANGING or FOLDING them and putting them away. I have no idea why I am this way. Ok, that is sort of a lie. I know precisely why I am this way. Reason #1 is because my family was this way growing up. We had a clothesline, and we'd bring clothes in from the line in a basket and set them in the living room. It took lots of nagging from our parents to put them in our rooms. Forget putting them in the closet. Reason #2 is that I am lazy. I feel like as long as the clothes are clean, I've done the laundry. The whole hanging and folding business is so TEDIOUS.

The irony in this is that I love an organized closet. My clothes are mostly hung up, and I have them arranged by season, style, and color. In addition, pants are separate from skirts, which are separate from shirts, and so on. And, if I am feeling particularly OCD, I hang the casual clothes in one spot and the work clothes in another. Nothing makes me feel like all is right with the world as much as a clean and orderly closet. GETTING my clothes into the closet in the first place is where I run into the trouble.

Anyhow. Last night I entered the house after a LONG day at work. On my way in from the garage, I noted the load of clean clothes that had been removed from the dryer and hung over its door, so as to avoid wrinkles. I came inside and my skin started to feel a little too tight as I noticed the pile of Darrick's work clothes carelessly tossed onto a chair in the den. I turned into the great room and saw more of his clothes on top of the table by the stairs. Twitching, I peeked into the dining room, where I was saddened to see that the load of clean clothes from 2 days ago was still stacked atop the table. I'm not sure what I thought would have happened to those clothes? Self-hanging? Spontaneous combustion? My husband hanging them?...

Nearing a nervous breakdown, I headed upstairs, where there were 2 laundry baskets in our room. One was half-full of dirty clothes, and the other was stacked 8 feet high - - - ok, 2 feet high - - - from, what was it? 2 weeks ago? 5? I'd lost track. And I was about to lose my mind as I peeked into the closet and noticed that my side consisted of about 19 items of clothing, none of which fit me after having a baby, and then Darrick's side which was also near empty. Time to bite the bullet and get the clothes put away.

I gathered the hangers from our closet and stacked them atop the clean clothes in the basket, lugging the whole thing down the stairs. I then went back up the stairs into Luca's room to fetch her empty hangers. Armed with so many hangers I could have melted down the plastic and built Luca a jungle gym from scratch, I started trying to sort the clothes. There are not a lot of places in our house to do this without risking either wrinkles or, more likely, dog hair on the clean items. So I moved 2 dining chairs into the great room to hang the clothes over. I wanted to sort them before hanging them, but turns out I would need to own a 14,000 square foot home in order to have the space to do that with all the freaking laundry we had waiting to be hung. Seriously, it was the Mount Kilimanjaro of the laundry world.

So...one HOUR and FORTY FIVE MINUTES later, I had sorted and hung and folded and matched up all the shits and pants and pajamas and socks we owned, and my only task was to put them away. I started with my clothes, taking care to arrange them in the closet in the correct places and color order. Next, I took Darrick's clothes up. On my way back down for Luca's stuff, I loaded up the dirty clothes on the floor and put them in one of the now empty hampers. I noticed a few clean things I had missed, so I grabbed them and, after putting Luca's things away, I hung the last items. Finally, Darrick helped me grab those last hung items, some towels, and the loose items such as socks and undies, and we took them upstairs.

Now it was TWO HOURS since I'd started this little undertaking of mine. I felt calm. Clean. Orderly. So I happily took the towels to the hall linen closet and returned to the bedroom in time to notice the hung items were missing. "Curious", I thought. I peeked into the closet, and right there, staring me in the face and MOCKING me, were 6 itmes of clothing. My items. My items, out of order. Certainly, those pants did not belong SMACK in the middle of the t-shirt section. Certainly, the red shirt could not POSSIBLY be mistaken for blue. Certainly.

This is where my head imploded, and my brains came out and splattered Darrick's shirt, and then for a moment I had to consider whether said shirt now belonged in the 'white shirt' section or in the 'red shirt' section. I settled for pink. Which, for the record, comes after red but before peach and salmon.