Laundry

When Eric arrived at college he did not know how to do his own laundry. It’s actually one of my first real memories of him: he was walking around Beaumont 3 with his basket of clothes and looking for advice. I bailed him out with the easiest instructions ever – just wash everything on cold, it will be fine! – and wondered how someone could be 18 years old without having done their own laundry before.

Fast forward multiple years: it is no surprise that, in our house, each person is responsible for their own laundry. To build that capacity in Raina and Lola required an escalating set of age-appropriate tasks: put everything in the basket, bring your basket out of your room, take your basket to the washing machine, toss everything in the machine (for a while at this stage they were not tall enough to start the machine themselves), and then they were 100% responsible for their own laundry by age 10. They would need reminders to do their laundry and especially about washing their own sheets and blankets, but they have the routine down now and they are competent with the skills.

What would end up happening, though, is every Whompton would wait until the weekend to do their individual laundry and suddenly we’d have 10 loads of laundry to do. Even worse, people would forget on Saturday, and then there would be 10 loads of laundry needing to be done on Sunday. Even worse than that, Krystal is notorious for forgetting to progress the laundry, so one of her loads would pause the system and slow the whole process. (In our house, not moving laundry out of the washer into the dryer or neglecting to pull your last load out of the dryer is known as “pulling a Krystal.”)

All in all, the system needed improvement. A month or so into the pandemic shutdown we devised a new method and it has worked wonderfully. Each person has their own designated day for laundry and, on that day, no one will fight you for the laundry machines or nag you to progress your laundry. (Community laundry has its own day too and Lola has that individual chore on Mondays.) Each person has 24 hours to get the job done that week and you can run as many or as few loads as you need. At this point, we each have a strong association of which day is ours and there have been very few hiccups. There is no nagging, no frustration about running out of time, and fewer instances of yelling at Krystal; devising this plan for laundry has done wonders for improving overall happiness in the house. Clear expectations work!