To Fold or Not to Fold...That is the Question...

I feel kinda like I have been just treading water around here...or, in our case, treading laundry since that seems to be what we are drowning in.

When my in-laws moved out, we decided to make their old room into a huge walk-in closet.  (Have I told this before?  Sorry if I have...)

Anyway, although it may seem like a huge waste of space in our little house, it actually works out quite well.  The kids never do anything in their rooms but sleep, so it seemed like a waste to put one of them in the second biggest bedroom in the house. (Jimmy's and mine is the biggest, although not by much, and it is a lot hotter in the summer and the ceilings are slanted, so there is something to be argued about if someone says we took the best room in the house.  We also have 4 people in our room, so I figure it's warranted.)  So, we put all of the dressers in the bedroom as well as a special bookshelf just for library books and a few drawers and cabinets for our homeschool and craft supplies.  The thing is that there are only 3 dressers, and we have 6 people.  It works out ok, though, because I have a basket on a table for my socks and stuff, and the Jesse and Gabriel share a dresser and Jimmy has one drawer in Elizabeth's dresser and one in Jo's dresser.  I do think that I am going to move the rest of my stuff back into our room, though, since right now all my stuff is just folded in a laundry basket and that makes it really hard to find anything.

But here's the catch:

One of the big reasons we decided to do this was because the kids always seem to be needing to change their clothes when they are downstairs.  They come downstairs to eat in the morning, then they change.  They take their showers in the bathroom, which is downstairs, and then they change.  So we figured that since all the clothes somehow ended up on the floor or shoved in drawers never to be seen again when the dressers were upstairs, if the dressers were DOWNSTAIRS, then Jimmy and I could keep a better eye on things.

Ok, let's be serious.  I could keep a better eye on things.  Jimmy's socks often don't make it where they belong, either.

But it seems that no matter how close of an eye I keep on things, that room seems to be constantly in some state of explosion!

I can wash and dry all the laundry and put it in the room, but if I don't fold and put it away immediately, then someone sits in the basket and dumps it or looks for that elusive t-shirt and tosses half of it on the floor, or someone 'forgets' that the dirty laundry goes in the bathroom and tosses their stinky socks on top.

The handy part of having everything together is that I can just fold and put away just standing there right in the middle of the room.  It's great.  The BAD part of having everything together is that there is usually one huge mess in there unless I REALLY stay on top of things.  And let's just say I haven't.  Really.

But then I realized that I would rather have one huge mess that I can see and tackle in one sitting than to have several smaller messes in separate rooms where I have to actually enter the room to find the mess and then sort out what is clothing mess and what is paper and toy mess and then tackle it.  (Elizabeth and Jo's room is so small I avoid entering it at almost all costs.  All they have in there is their 2 beds and a desk and a dresser full of Elizabeth's books, but somehow it is always a disaster and I can't enter without risking stepping on someone's something important and breaking it.)

So now, it seems that our roomer, Charlie, has also moved out, so we are quite giddy with thinking about what to do with his empty room.  Well, it's not actually empty since he let us use it even when he was living there, but it's more empty than it needs to be so we keep tossing ideas around about what to do with it.  The problem with it is that it is very very small, and it is also on the first floor.  The bedroom where Jimmy and I sleep is on the second floor.  So, to put a kid down there means that they would be all alone down on the main floor of the house.

Anyway, I'm not really sure what the point of this posting is, but if I wasn't here typing, I would probably be feeling guilty about not folding laundry.

So maybe that's the point of the post.  To assuage my guilt by pretending that I am doing something worthwhile instead of rolling socks!