I Hate Pinks

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I've become the de facto laundry-doer in our household. That's not to say that Diane doesn't contribute in this department; it's just that she deals with clothing at her "day job" and on a "subconscious level" avoids dealing with clothing at home, if at all possible. So the chore of laundering our garments falls into my hands, which is fine. Laundry is simply one of those necessary evils in life: the job that's NEVER done.

I have my laundry routine down to a science. Perhaps that's another reason why I've become Laundry-King of our household. I sort our clothes into six piles, yes, six. First I have the traditional dark and light piles. Then I have separate dark and light sock and underwear piles which I wash in hot water. It's underwear, people. Lord only knows what's growing in there, and I want them DEAD (the things growing in the underwear, not the underwear themselves...they're already dead). I also have a black pile since black is the only color Diane will wear. No, she's not a Goth and she doesn't have a fixation with death; she just likes black. And trying to get Diane to wear color is like asking Sunni's and Shiite's to get along: it's just not going to happen no matter how hard you try.

Because I have two young daughters, the last pile I sort is pinks. Sure there is an occasional purple or even an orange that sneaks into this pile, but for the most part, this is a big, heaping pile of pink. I hate doing pinks. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Not because they're pink, but because of what's CAKED ON the pinks. As precious as my girls are to me, they are...how do I put this gently...messy.

The pinks are the most laborious of my laundry loads. I have to inspect each article of clothing, searching for food stains (usually chocolate or ketchup), grass stains, dirt stains, or "what the hell is that?" stains. Then I pull out my faithful bottle of Shout and go to work. But it's not enough to merely SPRAY the stain; you have to work the Shout into the stain, vigorously rubbing the fabric together so that the cleaning agents can penetrate to the very heart of the stain. I do this with EVERY ARTICLE OF CLOTHING belonging to my beloved daughters and it takes frickin' FOREVER. And no matter how meticulous I am in inspecting their clothes for stains, I always seem to miss one smudge of chocolate or a dollop of spaghetti sauce hiding in an inconspicuous location. Always. It's maddening. I mean, how in the world do you get food stains in your armpit?

I can't wait for the day both girls to outgrow their affection for pink. Not that the color pink is necessarily the problem. I just now associate that color with food stains and the smell of Shout. I'm like Pavlov's dog: every time I see the color pink, I get the urge to clean. One possible solution is to reintroduce the girls to a handy little gadget called a bib. Yeah, like that'd go over well. The REAL solution is for me to shut up and and grab the Shout.