Little known fact: I hate doing laundry.
I have always disliked doing laundry.
I was never properly trained to find the joy in laundry.
What I do find joy in?
Completed tasks.
So, laundry can be a solid enterprise for me.
But when you have babies and a giant of a husband, it seems as though this is the worst of the mundane tasks around your household.
Also, I severely dislike clutter.
And laundry looks an awful lot like clutter to me.
So it gives me a complex every time I see it sitting around.
Life must be very difficult for me mustn't it?
However: I have found a way to live with myself!
The best thing about being in a Young Life family and getting going to go on assignments every summer is the lessons you learn about yourself when living amongst 15 other families.
You have to basically die to you own "musts" and "have to's" and learn to get along with others.
It is difficult but fantastic.
AND since you live there for so long, whenever you come home, you basically get a "do over" in you own life.
So this summer, we were at Frontier Ranch and they only had one laundry room for the 10 families that needed to use it. We had to sign up for our 1/2 day shift to do our laundry and it simply had to get done. Every evening it would be open if there was an emergency like someone got sick, wet the bed or you really needed your jeans washed. But overall, Tuesday morning was my morning to get my whole families laundry done for the week AT CAMP.
It was a tall order and the laundry would pile up, but I found rest in it because I knew I couldn't do anything about it. I just had to wait.
And then I would be serious about it. Do my laundry. Fold it in front of the dryer. I didn't have time to keep fluffing it until I felt like folding it. It had to be done THEN.
Then I would walk it back to my cabin and be put away, that afternoon.
5 hours. All done.
So we came home and I went back to my old ways of doing laundry whenever I felt like it.
And the chaos of that system slowly got to me and I felt like my house and household tasks were always choking me. I never felt "done." I never had those moments of just being able to look at a pile of laundry and relaxing because it was going to get done, I felt like I was ALWAYS doing it.
I made a change.
Wednesday is now our laundry day.
All of it gets brought down in the morning and it has to be done by that evening.
I try to have it put it away as fast as possible.
Everyone knows that it is not going to get done another time in the week.
Wednesday is a good day for us because it gets us ready for whatever we have going on in the weekend and cleans up whatever happened last weekend.
Also, I don't want my weekend dominated by dumb laundry.
I like Saturdays.
I like Sundays.
I don't like laundry.
Remember?
If people bother me about it:
this is what happens to them.
Just kidding. It doesn't happen. The whole family has adjusted.
They know! They like it!
Because they like me when I don't hate them for wearing clothes.
(It's been known to happen)
Give it a try!
You don't have to leave for a month to start something new!
Just do it!
Nobody will hate you. They will question you, but hate? Nah.
