Collateral Damage: How having a high schooler ruined my laundering & my husband's morning sleep! :-(

edited to add photos! yay!
As weird as it may seem, doing laundry is one of my favorite household chores and, frankly, one of my various neurotic obsessions! ;-P

I have blogged about it over the years, mentioning the beginning of our now long-time obsession with practice of  line-drying back in 2007 and a funny fiasco from excessive line drying in an unseasonably warm January day (in 2008 -- right before Obama took office!) -- a direct consequence of my "laundering philosophy."

I wrote quite a bit about this"philosophy" and practices in the opening and "endnote" to this really long post about little boy underpants -- it sounds like such a promising topic, right? Unfortunately, however, humor is not my forte, so the post had lots of potential that wasn't realized. :-( I blabbered on about my laundering instead! :-D

Years later I wrote a quick post praising line-drying and I have also taken countless photos of clothes in my clothesline meaning to share them on the blog, but life always got in the way and those weren't posted...

... which brings me to the present moment. A day in which I had a load of laundry washing before 8 am, before I drove my youngest son to school! My fingers are really cold typing this (at 9:30 am) because I just hung that load outside to dry. It's 42 F (6 C) right now, and it will reach a maximum of 46 F (8 C), but there's plenty of sunshine and my obsession with line-drying knows no end! So, in the aforementioned "underpants" post I wrote that I don't do laundry very often (it helps that we have lots of clothes, particularly underwear, two weeks' worth) and that I generally mix bed linen (and kitchen tablecloths) with other clothes and that I do big loads that have to coincide with sunny days when I have time to hang it all to dry.

Well... that's how it used to be until high school uniforms ruined all that!! :-(

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE school uniforms (and my husband does even more than I do), they are convenient and save lots of time in the morning. Our sons' elementary schools only required "polo-style" shirts and pants that aren't sweats, that's all. The school logo red shirt was only a "field trip shirt." Now, my son not only needs to wear polo shirts with a logo, but the khaki pants he wears need to be a choice between two specific models from one vendor. In the beginning, I wasn't sure about the sizing, so he only had one pair of pants and two polos (navy blue and dark green), then I ordered one more pair of pants and two more polo shirts (white and red, different fabric). He wears these pieces of clothing daily, with the fleece sweater the school gave all students. This requires that I do laundry much more often than I did before and makes me cranky! I've never used the drier this often before since we started line-drying back in 2007. :-( And I'm using twice as much detergent and softener too.

So days like today when I can actually line-dry three loads of laundry make me very happy! When I hung the second load at 10:30, the first one had already some dry pieces and it had been a bit over an hour! I just hung the third load [at 12:20 pm] (this time just one set of sheets and a few other items) and later I will "warm them up" in the drier set on low. Oh, and I'm going to get at least one more polo shirt for Kelvin, maybe the light pink one (all boys should wear pink!), so I can have at least two that go with the light colored loads! (I think he doesn't like yellow [the only other option] like me).

Bonus cat in this photo that I just took (1:42 pm):

Enough about laundry, right? A few weeks ago K confessed that he was exhausted, really spent, and lamented: "I'm getting really really tired from losing over 45 minutes of sleep every morning!" I hadn't thought of it until that moment, but now that Kelvin needs to be in school at 7:30 am K has to wake up at 6:45 to make him breakfast, get ready and then leave the house between 7:15-20 to drop him off. He only wakes up our youngest son on his way back -- getting up at 7:30 is perfectly OK when you don't have to be in school until 8:15! I feel bad for K and I know I should try to drive Kelvin a ride few days a week, but I always have a hard time getting up in the morning. Sigh... Today K had a final, so I had to do it, that's why I did that very early load of laundry! ;-P

Now we can't wait for Kelvin to have a license 15 months from now. I just HOPE that his schedule won't be totally different from his younger brother so he can drive both of them to school then!