And to think: I married him for his brain!
We have a pretty good deal at our house, laundry-wise. As long as I get all the laundry clean and thrown on the couch by Tuesday evening, my husband folds it for me. It’s a win-win situation: I get the laundry folded, and he gets one evening a week to watch movies or television without feeling guilty or being pestered.
The only flaw in the arrangement comes when he puts the laundry into the baskets. We load up the baskets and then haul them upstairs to distribute the clean socks, underwear and towels to their proper homes. My job is to put the laundry away the next day. My husband is incapable of loading baskets with any discernable order. He says it’s too overwhelming: he looks at the piles of neatly folded clothes and his brain explodes with the task of organizing it all. This is the man who programs computers for a living. Who reads books on higher math for fun. Who has memorized entire algorithms, that he grabs from his brain at will. He is the engineer of the household. Yet, he is stymied by laundry.
Last week, I suggested he go about it “backwards”: think of each child, each room,and load the baskets accordingly… Henry on the bottom, Peter next, then me, then the towels for the kids’ bathroom….etc. He looked at me as if I were a genius. I was amused he had never thought of this before.
So this Wednesday, I hauled the baskets upstairs and started putting the laundry away… and it was all in a totally random order, again. Sigh.