On ironing and other important stuff

 

I used to love ironing. Before I had kids or even when Andrei was little it was one of my all times favorite housework. Things started to change little by little as I had less and less time to do it. Then I started procrastinating about it and there you have it, now it ‘s a burden.

But wait! I’ve just come-up with a new routine.  It involves a number of steps and some preparing events:

1. Wait until your husband has a Swedish class in the evening, your son has football practice and you have a pounding headache.
   
2. You will have to leave work early, pick up your son from the afterschool club, pick up your daughter from the daycare and take them to the football practice thing.
   
3. Negotiate on the way with your son that if he doesn’t want to go to the training session you could all just go home but there will be no TV or Play Station that evening. He will try to bargain with you for an extra hour of PS2 playing if he goes to football but don’t give in.
   
4. The weather should be freezing for this time of the year (late September) so all of you will not be dressed well enough for one hour outside with no sun to warm you up. You will be pacing up and down trying to stay alive while he is training.
   
5. Then you will hurry to the bus stop but the bus will be just passing by as you are crossing the street. Another 20 min of waiting.
   
6. You will get home finally but your head is ready to explode. The kids are happily playing in the tub while you fix some 5min meal for them.
   
7. You feed them, put them to bed, fall asleep with Ana and move to your own bed later when your husband gets home. So you go to sleep at HALF PAST NINE PM! Has that ever happened in the last seven years?
   
8. You wake up at 5:15 and debate whether to go back to sleep or get up and start the day. You’ve read many a time about the sleeping cycle and the chances that you will wake up all groggy when the alarm clock goes are quite big given that it is set to 6.
   
9. So you get up and attack the Everest of clean clothes waiting for ironing. It means about 5 washing loads. At that point there will be no clean pants and T-shirts for the kids in their closets, so you start rummaging through the pile looking for them. Then you get some gray cells to start working and sort up all the clothes by type and owner.
10.  Set up the ironing board in the kitchen (it's the only relatively clean room in the house and the big table perfect for piling ironed clothes) and get to business. Take all of Andrei’s pants to the kitchen and iron them, take all his T’s and iron them, take all of Ana’s pants and iron them, take all her T’s and iron them… You get the point.

The thing is if you’ve sorted them like said before you will iron them very fast (1min per item -Is it fast or not?), you won’t have to mix operations ironing-sorting, ironing-sorting, and in the end you will have the piles ready to go to their closets with ALL their clean clothes. You won’t have to wonder 2 days later where are the red pants from this red T-shirt that Ana insists on wearing today.

So this is the big discovery. Or you could just buy a tumble dryer and forget about ironing all together. That’s my plan B.