Let’s talk about laundry, shall we? It’s been a while. . .
When Mama Syd was here, she dove into the socks. Oh, the socks. While I was pregnant with Gem, I had a flash of brilliance and designated a spot for all of the lonely socks instead of chasing them through drawers. It has worked great and about once a month I sort through it, find the matches and put it back. It seems like Mama Syd always visits right about that time. . .
Mom? I go through the socks, I do. But they multiply. You understand.
She sat with those stinkin’ socks for hours. Granted, there were A L-O-O-O-OT of distractions during those hours but still, it was a task.
She texted Monday, “Math question for the boys this morning. 7 people in family, how many socks get dirty in 1 day? How many in 1 week if each person wears a clean pair each day?”
(An aside: the ‘clean’ designation is actually very important here. Certain individuals who shall remain nameless don’t always remember to don a clean pair.)
Anyway, we did the math. 14 socks in a day, 98 in a week.
Ninety-flippin’-eight.
I got light headed. Then we wondered just how many socks everyone owned. We estimated 10 pairs (a serious low-ball considering we KNEW that Tess had been gifted 20 pairs just for Christmas) and counted things up. That meant 20 socks per person and 140 in the house. Here is where I started to choke back the tears.
The boys at this point were uninterested in socks and chose instead to wrestle over and around a U.S. map puzzle. It fell to Ellie then to count out the basket of loner socks. She was happy to sort by color and count things into piles. We did fives and tens and learned that 2 tens makes twenty. She stayed chipper while I sweated over the running total in my head.
99 unmatched socks languished in the basket. Ellie was proud and I was hysterical. I knew there was a load in the wash which meant potential mates for some of the basket dwellers and also an entirely new crop of singletons to add to the ranks.
I should have chucked the whole basket right then and started over. Instead, I gave it to Tess to put back in the laundry room so I could pretend all was normal and dream of living in the tropics where they don’t wear socks. Ever.
And then? THIS Monday Jac took on the job of folding laundry while I grocery shopped. I came home to our bed littered with socks – and these were just the freshly cleaned. He searched in vain for matches and kept throwing mismatched and near-matched socks aside in frustration. There was a wild look in his eyes and he was unable to string full sentences together.
“What the . . .?” “I just -” “Wait! Is this . . .? No.” “Grrrrr!”
I slipped out of the room and down to the laundry. The look on his face when I came in with The Basket! Awesome. He almost cried.
It was a good night. We all put away at least 10 pairs of socks. We found long lost matches and called out our findings like treasure. It felt good. And the basket? Well, it’s still full. But we tossed a number of inhabitants that night into the wastebasket and that adds up to success in my book.
Love this post Annie!! I too have a basket of “lost” socks and at times it feels well, overwhelming, but there is nothing like the satisfaction of finding “most” of those lost “souls” and having your basket, “near,” empty! Amazing, you can take a mundane topic like lonely socks and make for a very entertaining read!!
Oh Annie, I love this. I decided to just sit here and feel sorry for you instead of doing the math for my own household. But I may need to steal your idea and create our own Basket!
Oh my Gosh! I was just lamenting over unmatched socks! How could I have done everyones laundry and still have 12 “singletons”! I thought about creating a basket, I really did, but decided to toss them back in the hampers to be washed again. Better luck next time. Thanks for the hilarious post!
I know, most moms don’t want to think about how many socks are floating around their house 😉
I will continue to send an occasional Math question to the boys just to get them to apply math in real world problems. (My class is really hating it right now, because sometimes I make these questions their ticket to recess.)
I have had a sock basket for a few years now. It is a great trick! When I have found that all the socks in the house have been cleaned and matched (which only happens once a year) we take the loners and make sock puppets 🙂
You should sometime take a look at our sock collection we have produced over the years. We have a joke that a hole in the washer sucks lonely socks up in every load…. who knows?!??? 🙂
Annie your post made me laugh. But just wait until the girls are teenagers, because apparently teenage girls socks are not suppose to match anyway.
Deja vu!!! I had a sock basket for years. It was actually the picnic basket I got from my boss for a wedding gift. I emptied it whenever we went on picnic. Oy-vay. It had a lid that closed so I could forget about all those ‘singletons’ but then one day it was TOO SMALL! Imagine. I felt like socks were creatures from the Back Lagoon. Our game of ‘it’s a match’ or the incentive of 5 cents a pair wasn’t able to keep the creature at bay. I felt stress that if I threw away a perfectly good Smart Wool sock the mate would come knocking at the door the next day like it always did. Well, I should warn you, the socks don’t go away. I have 2 bags of them that I now hide because invariably, unnamed boys dig through them and leave them like so much dirt behind them. (visualize a dog unearthing a bone). In the end they wear an unmatched pair. I look like a really incompetent mother once again. Oy-vay again. Now I refuse to let economy packages of socks enter my house.Ask my girls. Three pair at a time max and “you have to throw away your old ones – better yet give them to me”. Why have I saved them (or at least some of them)? Because, believe it or not, I honestly have been dreaming ofl building a sock sculpture some day-a tribute to stay-at-home moms and a memorial to the widowed socks of the world that roam around like banshees and try to make me join them in their wailing. Hey Annie, do you want to join me?! Seriously. After school gets out in May.
COUNT ME IN.