Two Odd Things

Odd Thing #1: I have a weird fetish about getting everyone dressed in the morning. Perhaps it's having spent too much of my life stuck at home, sick or exhausted. Pajamas are, to me, a sign of defeat. It's not just letting the difficulties of life get the best of you, it's waving the white flag before the battle begins.

So, in the morning, we get dressed. Everybody. (I am not, I admit, adverse to putting babies to bed in their clothes.) We may have given up on paper plates because we ran out of room in the garbage--we may bathe with the frequency of Elizabethan vagrants--our living room floor may be serving as a model for the next series of I Spy books. But we will get dressed! And then we will probably go take a nap.

Not to the shoes, of course. Shoes are evil.

Odd Thing #2: I cannot sort things. I don't know why it has taken me so many years of vague frustration to realize this. But something slips in my brain between the mental assignment of categories and the physical movement to the appropriate category. It never goes to auto-pilot. Every garment I must stop and think, consciously: "Is this Light or Dark? It is Dark. Where is the Dark pile? It is over there." At the end, there are invariably three black socks in with the t-shirts because at some point I got bored with this monologue and started trying to sort automatically, like I presume every other adult on the planet can do.

This is why I have arranged my laundry in a way that only requires sorting two loads a week. (Mine and DOB's into lights and darks.) The rest of the laundry stays within its own categories (big kids clothes, baby clothes, towels, diapers) and never has to be sorted on its happy progression from hamper to washer to dryer to basket to drawer. Except for when I'm far enough ahead to actually fold, when I find I always end up with fifteen different piles of the same thing because I couldn't keep it straight in my head where they piles were supposed to be. Fortunately the ducklings seem to have this basic preschool skill down pretty well and help me out at times.

This is also why I've been cowering in terror at the thought of trying to tackle the bags and boxes of clothing that had taken over the attic. DOB and Cicero baled me out on the bulk of it this week--it was much easier if I could just look at a garment and shout out a category and let someone else figure out that fiendishly difficult task of actually putting it in the right spot.