Frilly Unmentionables

Wow. I've got a million blog posts rolling around in my head right now. OK, maybe three. Maybe. More probably two. The children each had a birthday, and quite frankly, the fact that parenting is getting harder suddenly clobbered me over the head last night. This post, however, is going to be light hearted, because a stranger saw my underwear today.

So. Laundry. It's gotta' get done, right? In my house I do it. Just another one of those housewifey duties I took over when I got knocked up, walked up to my boss, and told her I would no longer like to show up to work every damn day.

Laundry is a chore that never fails to sneak up on me. I'll spend two days doing it, then walk around all smug and proud that everyone's got clean clothes and sheets and there are plenty of towels and man, I'm good at this whole being a housewife thing. Meanwhile my family is walking around wearing clothing and taking showers and sleeping in their sheets. Before I know it it's two weeks later and those same clothes are sitting in hampers scattered around the house waiting to be washed again. "But, I just did the laundry!" I think. Like those two weeks just didn't happen.

Every once in a while I let it go WAY too long, though, and then I have an epic, epic amount of laundry to do. I could die in the basement in a pile of laundry and it would take weeks to find me. One night this week after Oliver was done with his shower he went to find a clean pair of underwear and declared he was 'all out'. I didn't believe him, because of course I'd just done laundry, so I checked in his drawer and sure enough, no underwear in there. Then I turned around to look at their overflowing hampers. Perhaps I hadn't JUST done laundry.

For the last two days I've been doing laundry. Load after load of laundry. I haven't even touched the towels yet. Which means I've been folding load after load of laundry in the living room. Sometimes an article of clothing spills out of the hamper and I'm unaware of it, or I'm aware of it, but my hands are full and I'll just get it later. So, today, after dropping the kids off at school (and helping with breakfast and cutting out some frog faces for the preschool classroom and getting a box of books to get ready for the library) I came home just in time for the piano tuner to show up. I let him in and he walked over to the piano to take the stuff off the top so he could start his job when I saw them. There, in the middle of the living room rug, was a pair of my underwear. All crumpled up, with a neon arrow pointing at it, shouting "LOOK AT ME! THIS WOMAN IS DISGUSTING! SHE LEAVES HER UNDERWEAR ON THE LIVING ROOM FLOOR FOR STRANGE MEN TO LOOK AT!" These were not, of course, modest mom panties. Nope, if I'm going to leave a pair of underwear laying around, they are going to be humdingers.

What to do? I'm fairly sure at this point he hadn't seen them. I didn't want to draw attention to them, but I couldn't just let them lay there. He was talking pleasantly and I was trying to form coherent sentences and answer his questions and not seem like a total mute freak who leaves her underwear on the floor. I don't know how he couldn't have seen them, because to me they were lit up with a spotlight while the rest of the room lay in darkness. "Get them!!" my brain screamed at me. Still, I didn't want to draw attention to them. I tried melting them with lasers from my eyes but that didn't work (never does), and then I came up with an elaborate plan to pretend to fall and land on them and do some sort of rolling move where I could put them into my pocket without him noticing.  Right before I was about to pull the trigger on my tuck and roll move he sat on the piano bench and turned his back to the rest of the room. I quickly scooped them up, stuffed them into my pocket (classy), and then I went out in the back yard and burned them.