Our clothes dryer broke down last week. It became clear, after spending a full day trying to dry a load of cloth diapers, that the poor machine was wheezing its last breath.
At first, I'm sure I grumbled a bit. 'Who has time to go to the laundromat?' I must have thought. Yet now I ask, Who doesn't have time?? What an unexpectedly appreciable turn of events!
As many parents will attest, laundry can become a seemingly impossible, unending task. While I feel I had a fairly goodish grasp of the laundry~~meaning, it got done~~it seemed to be perpetually in progress while never quite getting put away enough to my liking, with children going through the dryer to find matching socks and me constantly reminding them of their job to put away their stacks of clean clothing. In other words, occasionally, it seemed to take over the entire house and my day (or week) along with it.
Enter broken dryer. Thank you God! We packed up all our dirty clothes, sheets, towels, etc. and I headed to the local laundromat. Alone. I~~get this!~~brought a book with me! I quickly realized that laundromats have turned high tech and I headed to a nearby store to exchange my ready rolls of quarters for paper bills to feed the device that loads an electronic key card of sorts that operates the machines (fancy!).
I got four loads of laundry started, dried them in two large batches, and walked out of there in under 2 hours with every shred of laundry in my house clean and folded! If the italics seem excessive, then you have never tried to keep up with laundry for a house of 6 (or seven during the summer), including one very ooey, gooey baby. I'm excited!
The only hitch in the equation are Bethany's cloth diapers. I opted not to ick out the whole of Eagle River by washing her cloth diapers at the laundromat. I ran them through their two wash cycles at home and then brought them, clean, to the laundromat with the rest of the clothes to get dry at that point. I then washed them again last night and ran them over there for an hour to dry them and get in some more reading time. Who needs a dryer when there are books to read? (My obliging husband plays a big role in this, of course.)
Is this the most cost effective option? Probably not. I haven't calculated what I spend on energy to say that with certainty, but the savings in time and household neatness and sanity may be more than worth it.
Isn't Alex great? I don't think enough can be said about a loving counterpart that helps and makes life easier. How did you do with transporting all that cargo? That's the part I liked least. I remember cloth diapers-and I am so glad they are a thing of my distant past. They are a lot of work to keep up with. Kudos to you for all your hard work and getting in some reading time to boot!
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