The Mixed Up Brains of Lisa Weinstein

Introducing Cindy Brown - My First Guest Post!

Hi there, one of the best things about blogging has been the opportunity to meet so many of my fellow bloggers.  Today I am pleased to present my first guest post, presented by my friend, fellow blogger, and brilliant writer Cindy Borwn - who has a wickedly funny blog called Everyday Underwear.  Cindy's blog was recently syndicated by Blog Her!

Cindy Brown is a middle-aged (if she lives to be 84) midwestern mom of two girls and a wife to a wonderful husband.  She has many animals, including her beloved Great Pyrenees dogs and (tolerates) her kids' mini-weenie and her husband's bees.  Cindy started her freelance writing career last year and began her humor blog http://www.EverydayUnderwear.com/ in November of last year.  Follow Cindy on Twitter at http://www.Twitter.com/hiyacynthia or enjoy her Facebook Page at http://www.Facebook.com/EverydayUnderwear. Cindy's goal is to pass out funny bones to all of the needy and humor impaired inhabitants of earth (and other planets when the World Wide Web becomes the Interplanetary Web).

Messing with my Laundry is Grounds for Justifiable Homicide

I may not be the best housekeeper, have a Mother of the Year award on my mantel, or do Betty Crocker any justice whatsoever, but there are certain things you don’t mess with in my house.

Laundry is the number one thing I wish to murder my children over. I’m not kidding. Okay, maybe I am, but I have honestly gotten so mad at them over messing with my laundry that I’ve wondered how bad a prison sentence could really be.

They must not realize how hard I labor over laundry. It’s a huge challenge to get the laundry to the laundry room in the first place. They reside upstairs. I don’t like to go up there unless there’s a very good reason, like uncontrollable crying and/or screaming or perhaps an unusually loud and inexplicable thud. It’s scary and disappointing up there. There is immaturity beyond comprehension and mess beyond understanding up there. There are monsters up there.

Someday, my children will grow up and move out. THEN, I might go upstairs. But until that time comes, I rely on them to bring the laundry down to me, with occasional spot-checking for moldy towels or to help pull items from the depths of their closet that they’re sure are lost and gone forever. They are usually wrong and I’m happy to prove it.

One of my laundry frustrations is when I ask them fifty times to bring the dirty laundry down and they say, “okay” a thousand times and throw a few items down the stairs and make me think it’s all down here. I do all the laundry and feel very proud of myself and then WHAM! They bring down the mother lode and I have to start all over again. “Where did that come from?” They don’t know. They never know. Grrrr!

The process:

1)      Get it downstairs (and from every other conceivable corner in the house)

2)      Sort

3)      Wash

4)      Dry

5)      Sort again/lay in very neat piles

6)      Deliver to designated areas

7)      Put away

8)      Start over

9)      Do it again

10)   Repeat ad nauseam

11)   Kill anyone who makes process harder

After the step one frustration, my children make this process harder before step three and after steps five and six. Before step three (wash), they enter the laundry room and ransack the baskets looking for an article of clothing to wear, even if it’s dirty and stinky. They rarely find the article of clothing they’re searching for, leave the contents of the basket all over the floor – sometimes multiple baskets’ contents are left on the floor -- and I have to do a complete re-sort. I want to kill them.

After step five, they will come down and ransack the clean piles of sorted laundry in search of an article of clothing to wear, leave the entire pile right there where they found it instead of taking it upstairs to put it away, and they leave the pile in horrible disarray, thus wrinkling and upsetting my very neatly made stacks. I am past wanting to murder them at that point. By then, I am thinking, “How can I conceal the dismembered bodies and where will I say they have gone?”

After step six (deliver to designated areas), they will fail to do as they are told, “Stop what you’re doing right now and put these away,” and they will leave some or all of the clothes on their bed, where they get slept on, knocked off, and re-deposited into the dirty laundry. Clean, wrinkled, and smelly from hanging out with actual dirty laundry. So, I have to wash it again.

How many years do they give for manslaughter?