Photo a Day: On My To-Do List

Being a stay-at-home mom, I always have a long list of things on my to-do list. But one item that never seems to go away, no matter how often I do it, is putting away laundry.

Not doing laundry; not even folding laundry. There are definitely times (they only last for about 12 seconds each, but there ARE times) when all the laundry in the house is clean and folded - nothing languishing in the dryer, nothing collecting in the laundry hampers, no damp towels on the bathroom floor - but I don't think there has ever been a time when there hasn't been a stash of neatly folded laundry loitering somewhere in my house.

Most often, it's giant piles on the stairs, as in this photo. With my laundry room in the basement and the bedrooms on the second floor, I rarely make separate trips to bring laundry upstairs, so it waits here until I'm headed upstairs for some other reason. Most often that "other reason" is that I'm going to bed. And since I can only carry one (or sometimes two, if I'm feeling especially adventurous) stack of laundry at a time, it takes me several days to get the stairs cleared.

And of course, by then, another stack has usually joined them.

On the rare occasion I manage to get all the stacks from the stairs moved up into their respective bedrooms at the same time, they generally languish in front of the bureaus where they belong for some time until the owner is reminded (and reminded, and reminded) to put them away. Or, more likely, until I get annoyed enough to put them away myself. (Note: These comments do not apply to the adults in the household, who are usually pretty good about putting their clothes away in a timely fashion. Well, the male adult in the household is. The female is usually pretty good about moving them from the floor to the couch which serves as an adjunct bureau.)

So yeah, it's pretty much always On My To-Do List.