Double Duty. One Paycheck.
In which I remind myself that I don’t love doing laundry on my day off
Since I work full time during the week, Saturday has become Laundry Day at my house.
We don’t have our own washer and dryer right now. Instead I have to separate my clothes on our bedroom floor and lug them down in the elevator with my toddler and his toys in tow as well as my detergent. We head to the laundry room in our building dressed in our jammies early every Saturday morning. Then we go back up to the apartment and set the kitchen timer. When the time is up, we head down to move the clothes into the dryers (or back up to the apartment to hang dry).
Rinse and repeat.
I do 3 loads a week. (Maybe more if I choose to wash all of our sheets and blankets that week.)
Lately I have been feeling sorry for myself that my Saturdays are “wasted” on laundry. That is, until I heard from Shana.
So Shana, over at Gorillabuns, recently admitted to me that she did 15 loads of laundry last weekend.
I know from experience that each load takes about 42 minutes in the washer and 52 minutes in the dryer. That’s 630 minutes of washing and 780 minutes of drying for a total of 1410 minutes, or 23.5 hours.
There are only 24 hours in a day, which means that Shana spent an entire day doing laundry. AN ENTIRE DAY, doing laundry.
Needless to say, that’s a lot of freakin’ laundry.
I guess I shouldn’t feel so sorry for myself anymore. I should also rethink ever having another kid. Shana has two kids. That’s only one more then I currently have. I never thought that having one more baby would more then triple the amount of laundry I did.
Frankly, I don’t have the time.
Isabel is a pseudonym for this Seattle-based blogger. She’s been working since the day she realized soda and lip gloss weren’t free. Isabel became a mom in 2006 and continues to work full time, outside the home, since diapers and mortgages aren’t free either. You can read far too much about her personal life at hola,isabel.
If you have questions, anecdotes, or topics for “Double duty. One paycheck.”, email Isabel at holaisabel [at] gmail.com.
Just teach Babboo to do his own laundry — that oughta save some time, right? Or, wait…would it just make more of a mess? Don’t ask me, I don’t have a kid.
Laundry day definitely sucks, no matter how you do it or how much you have to do. While I love that Tim is student teaching and loving every minute, I definitely do not love doing an entire extra “delicate” load of dress shirts and then having to iron them. Needless to say I didn’t protest at all when he said he planned to trade the dress shirts for polo shirts once he has his own classroom.
Seriously, I did spend the WHOLE day doing laundry. and some of the next day as well.
and here I thought boys were supposed to be messier than girls!
If I don’t do 2-3 loads of laundry a day, I’m in serious trouble. And I only have 3 kids . . . go figure!
You will love having your own place to do laundry when the house is finished!
I hear ya sister. Laundry isn’t fun now and I don’t even have kids yet! At least you can set a timer and do other things while the machines are doing their thing. I know, having to keep running to the laundry room all day is a pain in the booty, but at least you don’t have to sit there the whole time. That would REALLY suck!