Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The laundry gods did not smile on me today...

I got home from the gym this morning with a grand plan. Today I would spend all day, if necessary, getting all of my laundry done. Folded and put away in the drawers kind of done. Well, you know what they say, they best laid plans and all that...


One of my children was awoken by an overfull bladder. I can count on one hand the number of times both of them have had an accident in the bed, even including while potty training. So I was unfortunately not prepared. The plastic sheet I used to have on the bed ripped several months ago and I hadn't thought to replace it. Oops. This meant a larger scale clean up as I had to clean and dry the mattress.  Jake saw me stripping down the bed and said in his most knowing voice, "I guess we'll be sleeping in our sleeping bags tonight. Huh, mom?"  I gave him my best superior look and informed him that I would have the sheets washed and the bed remade long before bedtime rolled around.

While the mattress was off the bed I decided it was as good a time as any to tackle the dirt that had accumulated on the wall from little hands and feet. And once that was done I started noticing all the places that Lila has decorated lately.


This one is hot pink permanent marker. Magic eraser didn't quite cut it. Any ideas? Other than repainting...


I also got to go on a little Easter egg hunt of my own, looking for all the places Lila has used her Easter stamp. So far the list includes her face, the walls in the living room, her bedroom, hallway, stairway, the kitchen table, Evie's bed, Lila's dresser, and the lid of the toilet. Oddly enough they all cleaned up fairly easily, except for the lid of the toilet which is still a pale pink color that I am hoping is not permanent. I hope my mother in law won't be offended when I tell her the stamp in question has been thrown away.

During all this I kept cycling through the laundry in a heroic effort to get the sheets washed and the bed remade before Jake got home from school. I threw the sheets into the dryer just as it was time to go and pick him up. We ran a quick errand and when we arrive home I went to pull them out and found this...


Why I didn't think to check the pillow cases for purple crayon I'll never know... such a rookie mistake. I took a moment to just breathe and then decided that the silver lining was that these are the old sheets that were already ruined by blotchy bleach stains and I still had time to wash the other set of sheets. I dug through the laundry where they had been patiently waiting at the bottom of the pile for about a month awhile, and I had forgotten that they needed to be washed because someone spilled a cup of chocolate milk all over them. I decided to give some Spray n' Wash a shot and hope they weren't stained for good. I held the sheet up in one hand and gave it a good three or four sprays before the bottom of the bottle fell off the trigger. I just stood there watching the entire bottle of Spray n' Wash spill out onto the floor. Since I need the pretreatment on the sheet anyway I used it to mop up the mess as much as possible and then threw it in the wash.  

Then it was time to make dinner and get kids bathed and to bed, and I just ran out of time.
Dang it. Know-it-all seven year old...

3 comments:

Sandra and Brent said...

And then you woke up and realized that the whole thing was a terrible nightmare . . . ummm, nope. Photographic evidence that the whole thing was real! Thank goodness for blogging so you can at least entertain the rest of us with your very bad, horrible, terrible laundry day! LOL!

Emilie said...

Ugh. But seriously, doesn't having the whole room torn apart make you want to redecorate?

Lawson Family said...

So close! Curse you purple crayon!!