Laundry is not a dirty word

I hate laundry.  For 2 adults, a child and an infant, we have quite the load of dirty clothes.  Every time I have to attack that dreaded chore, I cringe a bit inside.

It seems that laundry is the never-ending chore.  No matter how hard I try, I cannot get caught up.  About the time I get all of the loads washed and folded and put away, a new pile awaits me.  Never.  Ending.

I don't actually mind the washing part.  We have a laundry chute that our clothes go down and ends up in the basement.  The only clothes that don't go down are the kids clothes.  Each child has their own laundry basket in their room and it's not much to lug those down to the basement either.  Sometimes our daughter's clothes end up down the chute also, so it's really just the baby's clothes that are kept separate and the only reason for that is the fact that his clothes get washed in Dreft.

I hate that moment that I open up cabinets to the bottom of the laundry chute.  I open them and there's usually a pile of clothes waiting for me.  A pile, so high, that towers up into the chute above it.  I have to be very careful pulling out the clothes, because one false move and the whole pile will come raining down on me in an avalanche of dirty clothes.   Sigh.

I'm not much for sorting the clothes.  I usually gather as many as i can and shove them in the washer.  We have a high efficiency and I can cram a lot in there.  The only snafu with this method is my husband's nasty habit.   He smokes and for some God-only-knows-reason, he shoves the cigarette butts in his pants pockets.  He says its so he doesn't litter.  I call it flat out laziness.  He is home 80% of the time and we do own trashcans.   I've tried rebelling and telling him I'm not doing his laundry unless he cleans out his pockets, but since he doesn't care if he stays in the same clothes for days at a time, this didn't really work.  So my sorting also consists of digging into his pockets and pulling out butts and tossing them in the trash.  Then my hands smell like nasty cigarettes.  Ew. Ew. Ew.

The part I hate the most about doing laundry?  It's the actual sorting and putting away once they're clean.  I'm the only one who seems to know how to do this job too.  I tell ya, I'm a real one-woman-machine here.  By the time I've sorted, and cleaned pockets and washed and also taken care of the baby and Hubs in between washings, I'm beat.  I end up piling the cleaned clothes onto beds where they stay for days until I get them put away.  Or, I tend to dump them into a clean laundry basket until I get to putting them away.  Problem is, I tend to not do that very quickly and by the time I do, the cycle has started all over again.

Never. Ending.

Maybe someday the Laundry Fairy will come visit me and take over this chore.  Or maybe someday my husband will actually take initiative and start doing the laundry himself.

I think I have a better chance of the Fairy coming.