How Laundry Happens...

It’s morning. You’ve got some place to go and inevitably you’re in a time crunch. You shout at your kid, ‘We’re going out in five minutes, get dressed! Clean your teeth!’ After another couple of exhortations, your kid finally extracts itself from the television.
 
Fifteen to twenty minutes later your child appears at the bottom of the stairs, dressed but with teeth uncleaned. At this point you say/shout (depending on your stress level), ‘It’s a school day, get your uniform on!’ or ‘We’re having dinner with the Prime Minister, get the football strip off!’ or ‘It’s minus 5 outside, put on a pair of long trousers!’ (Now, I’m partial to a pair of shorts in all weather myself, but then I don’t descend into a Duracell whine when I feel cold…)
 
Child retreats back upstairs and reappears some half an hour later potentially properly dressed. (You then forget about the teeth until some undisclosed moment later on when they breath on you.) The day progresses as planned.
 
Let’s ignore the rest of the day and go back in time to the moment when the kid returns to his/her room to change out of whatever completely inappropriate clothing he/she had on in the first place. At this point the child:
 
a)   removes the clothing, folds it up neatly and puts it back in a drawer.
b)   throws off the clothing with happy abandon, leaving it in a crumpled heap on the floor.
c)   finds a toy that they completely hate and decides that they really have to play with it for fifteen minutes.
d)   fights with their brother/sister over some tiny piece of plastic crap that neither of them actually wants.
 
Pick three from four. The clothing they’ve removed inevitably gets lost under some other toy or game or such in the ensuing stramash. The next time you’re in the room, the place is such a mess that you hardly notice the clean, once-neatly pressed clothing lying in a heap.
 
This happens Every Day. When you get to the stage of not being able to see the floor, you politely enquire of them if they might clean their room, and they grudgingly mump up the stairs at the seventeenth time of asking. They pick up all the clothes lying around and put them in the laundry basket. You dump the clothes in the washing machine in a bundle, and it’s only then, when you’re hanging the things up and you are actually noticing individual items of clothing, that you start to think, ‘I don’t remember the wee man wearing that…’ and ‘He hasn’t had that on in two years…’ etc. And then you realise why it is that almost 90% of the washing you do every day belongs to one of your children.
 
And so you shout at them again and the next time they have to change five minutes after they’ve got dressed they remember to put things back in a drawer – cramming it in there in a crumpled mass – and that happens no more than once, then they go back to their old ways and you’re still having to buy a jumbo sized packet of Persil every few days at the supermarket on the corner.

And that's how laundry happens.

Next time...why you have to buy toilet paper every single day.