my kid's love of dogs

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To-Do List Follow Up and Then Let’s Completely Ignore Dinners This Week and Talk About Laundry Instead

I know you are buzzing with the anxiety of knowing whether I completed my to-do list on Friday. Let me put you (temporarily) out of your misery: No, I did not. 

But! I did accomplish parts of it. 

  • I made the phone call and hopefully our late fee/credit card charge have been eliminated and we have not overpaid for a month of this utility service. Time will tell. (Just a note: it took me a good ten minutes to even find the phone number I needed to call; it is not online anywhere, I don’t think, and I had to search through bills in my email. Then I got an automated message that the wait time exceeded twenty minutes, so they could call me back, and I chose that option. Only to look perplexedly at my phone 45 minutes later to find that I HAD missed a call, but my phone chose to silence it as it had determined the call was probably spam. I did get through to a live human on my next call though, so all is well that ends well.)
  • While I posted photos of my supposedly daily walks, I did not go for a walk Friday or do any sort of exercise. (Wait a second. We did wander around a farmer’s market for awhile. And then Carla and I did go swimming Friday – the last swim of the season – and I did twelve laps of various poorly executed strokes. My watch said I burned 30 calories LOL.) Sigh. I did go for two delightful walks on Saturday though – a walk with a friend in the beautiful autumn woods, and then a flashlit walk with Carla and the puppy she was dog-sitting. Sunday, again no walk at all – WHY is it so challenging to get outside or on the treadmill for TEN MEASLY MINUTES? – but at least I did a strength training workout. Also, for the record, I am walking on the treadmill as I type this post. 
  • Did I find a new eye doctor? No I did not. My eye doctor efforts included a) whining about eye doctors to my friend during our Saturday walk and b) whining about eye doctors to my parents on Sunday. My husband, who was on hand for the second bout of whining, did some research into potential eye doctors. He discovered that perhaps I have been unable to get in to see MY eye doctor because he may no longer work for our hospital system and discovered that one of the only eye doctors accepting new patients is an eye doctor I saw a dozen years ago and decided against seeing again.
  • I folded the clean laundry in the photo I posted Friday, plus a surprise load of clean laundry I’d left and completely forgotten about in the dryer, plus a load of darks. And I did manage to WASH three additional loads of laundry – four, if you count the reds that are in the washing machine as I type. One of those loads is now occupying the clean laundry basket so recently emptied; another is on my bed as fresh, clean bed linens; a third is in the dryer. There is still a load of mainly-black clothing on the floor of my bathroom but it will at least migrate to the washer today. 
  • Finally, an unadulterated success: I DID make dinner Friday. I found a new recipe for barbecue pork, made it, and my husband liked it much better than he likes our old recipe. I like it fine, although it’s a little too vinegary. But that’s nothing a big slosh of barbecue sauce and sriracha won’t fix. Saturday I did not make dinner; I went out to lunch with my friend after our walk and it was amazing and there’s no way anything could top it, so my husband ate leftovers for dinner and I finished off the last of the previous weekend’s chili (do not tell your husband, Engie; although I did survive, so the gamble paid off). My parents made dinner Sunday and I’m really enjoying this not-making-dinner kick so let’s see how it goes. 

Anyway, since so much of my weekend has been occupied by laundry, I am in the mood to talk about laundry. (This is the part where your misery amps back up.)

I am 99% sure that others in our blogging community have discussed this topic before, but blog topics, like laundry, are not meant to be addressed once and then never again. As I was dutifully whining and complaining about doing laundry, I was noticing some of the things I do and wondering how YOU do them in your house. 

Collecting the Dirty Laundry:

We have three laundry hampers in our house. Carla has one in her closet, my husband and I have one in our closet for white clothing, and another one in our bathroom (a mere five feet from the closet hamper; it makes sense, I promise) for colors. When it’s time for laundry doing, which I probably do once a week unless I have a burst of There Is a Better Way to Do This Task, I sort the laundry into piles on my bathroom floor. Then I enlist Carla to sort her own clothing and add her piles to my piles. 

Sorting:

The piles I sort laundry into are roughly: whites, white towels, towels (and swimsuits), darks, lights, blacks and reds, delicates, rags. Carla and my husband sometimes struggle with what belongs in the darks pile vs the lights pile, which indicates that I may be overly rigid in my definitions. Especially because it 100% doesn’t matter in any way; I think I could probably get away with washing even the reds and the whites together and they would be fine. Really the only reason I divide things into piles at all is because they have to be divided somehow – there is too much laundry to fit into one wash cycle – and it would offend my aesthetic sensibilities if they were all jumbled together helter-skelter.

The lights pile includes things like pale blues, light greys, light greens, yellows, khakis, light wash denim. The darks pile includes dark wash denim, navy, dark blues/greys/greens. The color my family wears by far the most often – and by “my family” I mainly mean me, but Carla does contribute a lot of pinks – is black, closely followed by things in the red family, which includes purple, burgundy, and orange. I wear black leggings nearly every day and a lot of my sleepwear (different leggings) is black as well. If, as I did this laundry cycle, I wait so long that we have enormous quantities of black and red clothing, I will separate them into two piles. Wow, this is boring, and yet I persist. 

Getting the Piles into and out of the Laundry Room:

Usually I wait to sort laundry into piles until I have a good wave of laundry energy. But sometimes I will sort and then allow the piles to remain in our bathroom as some sort of avant-garde commentary on consumerism and laziness. I take each pile into the laundry room separately, loading the entire pile precariously into my arms. Do we have a (separate, dirty-clothes-only) laundry basket for just this purpose? Yes. Are the laundry hampers themselves on wheels? Yes, they are. Do I persist in hugging a giant pile of smelly laundry to my chest all the way to the washer, dripping socks and underwear whilst in danger of tripping over dangling sweater arms? Yes, yes I do. I am better about using the (clean clothing only) laundry basket to transport clean things from the laundry room to the folding space. But there is NO WAY to easily get the clean clothes into the laundry basket. Our dryer is stacked on top of our washer and I inevitably drop socks or underpants on the floor. And the laundry room is also our mud room, so this is probably not great, Bob, but I tend to look the other way. 

Responsibility:

Probably 90% of the time, I’m the one doing the laundry. I sort it, get it into the washer, less frequently get it into the dryer, then haul it into my bedroom for “folding.” I say “folding” because I only fold some of the clothing. I do not fold my or Carla’s underclothes, because we both prefer a jumble of drawers in our drawers. (I do fold my sports bras though.) To recap a topic I have already covered quite thoroughly, I bundle my socks together, and gently fold over the very tops of my husband’s dress socks, and stack his athletic socks in a neatish pile. I throw Carla’s socks in a pile because she enjoys mismatched socks, although this strategy is not working as well anymore as it should; she has a whole drawer full of socks and still tells me nearly daily that she can’t find any socks; something must be done to resolve this. I fold everyone’s pants and pajama pants, my husband’s underwear, and all my leggings and workout clothing and pajamas. 

I do not fold any of my husband’s shirts, as he prefers to do that himself. (Thank goodness, as I am TERRIBLE at folding. NOTHING is uniform.) I do not fold any of Carla’s shirts, as we have discovered that it works better for her to hang all her shirts in her closet rather than to stuff them into her dresser where they will never be seen again. Instead of folding, I lay everything out neatly – my husband’s stuff on his side of the bed, mine on my side (although I usually put my things away as I go), and Carla’s on the bench at the foot of our bed. My husband is then responsible for folding his shirts/putting his clothing away. Carla is ostensibly responsible for putting her clothing away, but it is more often than not sitting on the bench in my bedroom for weeks at a time. 

Things like rags, dish towels, and bath mats have somehow become my sole responsibility. I do not know if they would ever make it into the wash if I didn’t wash them. Do my family members know they require washing? Hmm. Perhaps I need to follow up on this one.

My husband takes sole responsibility for washing his dress shirts. They require additional attention, apparently, so I just stay out of it. Luckily, he owns more dress shirts than a J. Crew store, so he only washes them rarely. 

Historical Precedents:

I don’t know why we fold laundry on our bed. Maybe because it is technically closest to the laundry room? Or maybe because it makes it very simple for me to put my things away immediately? At our old house, laundry folding took place on the guest room bed. That made it all too easy to ignore the laundry for eons, so I think I prefer this setup, where we have to deal with it before we go to bed. 

When I was growing up, I have no recollection of where the laundry was folded. Perhaps in the laundry room, and then stacked on the ironing board? Perhaps on my parents’ bed? My mom did a load of ironing every weekend, and that took place in the laundry room or in the living room. I do not iron, so that’s not really a thing in our house. The only ironing board we own is a tiny dorm-size one that must have belonged to my husband in college. 

Sometimes I will fold rags or towels in the living room in front of the TV, or dump rags in a pile on the ottoman for Carla to fold while she watches TV. 

Carla knows how to do laundry, and sometimes helps. I did my own laundry from the time I was in middle school, and in fact used to iron my own jeans. Perhaps this is why I have such an aversion to ironing as an adult. Not that anyone was forcing me or even recommending that I iron my own jeans as a middle schooler, mind you.

My husband also knows how to do laundry, and does it better and more efficiently – thank you to my mother-in-law – and we used to do laundry together in our college laundry room, when it was mildly scandalous to launder our underthings in the same room, a time I look on fondly. By “better” I mean that he is more thoughtful about things like temperature and heat settings. I pretty much wash everything in cold and dry it all on regular, but he’ll wash towels in hot and dry them on the towel setting, things like that. (I wash rags in the sanitizing cycle, and throw both Oxy and vinegar in with the regular laundry soap.)

Laundry Approaches:

My husband and I have some very different approaches to laundry. One is towels. I like to run towels separately from clothing, because I feel like they take longer to dry and also they displace more fuzz than normal clothes and also because they are towels and clothing is clothing. My husband is fine washing his white undershirts and socks with his white towels. I say, to each his own. 

He is also a bit more strict about volume. I figure, if my washer claims it can handle a king size comforter, then I can usually get all of our black and red clothing to fit in one load. I do have limits. But he is much more wary of overcrowding. 

The other major differentiation between us is something I have written about all-capsily before; in this house, we do not have a towel for any purpose in the laundry room, even though our current washing machine is also a front loader.

Shifting Values:

My position on bleach has changed over the years. When I was a kid, we had well water instead of city water, so we didn’t really own any white clothing. But any white clothing we did have required bleach to maintain its purity. For years after I moved out of my childhood home, I continued to bleach our white clothing. But in the past six? ten? years or so, I have moved away from bleach. I make liberal use of Oxy Clean, especially with our white bedding and my husband’s white clothing and towels, and I haven’t noticed any degradation in color. 

We also used to use liquid fabric softener, but the washer in my current house does not drain the liquid fabric softener properly, so we have moved to dryer sheets. I’ve tried dryer balls exclusively, but those don’t work as well as the sheets. I do forget to add sheets a good amount of the time. Shhhh – don’t tell my husband.

Laundry Problems:

By far my biggest laundry problem is forgetting to move things from the washer to the dryer, and then needed to re-run them with vinegar and Oxy to get rid of the inevitable mildew smell. That has been a problem ever since I moved into my own house and out of a dorm room/apartment with a shared laundry space. But. Now there is another laundry problem. One that also necessitates re-washing entire loads of laundry. 

Why yes. That IS dog food. Carla apparently stores dog food in her pockets and then forgets to empty her pockets before she puts her clothes in the laundry. And then I forget to check her pockets before I run the laundry. The dog food gets all mushy and coats the entire load of laundry in Eau de Dog Food, so there is no choice but to run it again with a stiff dose of Oxy and vinegar. 

For those who observe Yom Kippur, I hope the holiday has been meaningful for you. For those who observe Canadian Thanksgiving, I hope the day is full of good food and empty of drama.

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Christmas Spirit and Assorted Updates

I am sitting in my living room with a lovely view of the Christmas tree, lights glowing softly in the morning dim, and I am still feeling distinctly grinchy. What is my DEAL. We could easily blame my lack of spirit on the fact that I have to go to Costco today, the week before Christmas, because I have somehow allowed our toilet paper and paper towel supplies to dwindle to dangerous levels. Or perhaps we could point to the fact that my daughter’s school just informed us that winter vacation will begin a day early, so agitated are they about rising numbers of Covid cases in the system. And, worse, that the kids will be coming home with devices just in case we cannot return in January as planned, and need to remain remote for a while. Cue wailing and rending of garments. Of course of course I am glad that Carla’s school continues to take this pandemic so seriously. Of course I would rather keep her home than expose her unnecessarily. Of course I want to be a good community member. Of course we will be fine if we need to do a few days or weeks of remote learning. But. Anguished scream.  

However, even before this very unwelcome announcement from the school administration, I had been feeling distinctly dispirited.  Christmas music irritates me, unless it is a very specific and somehow highly elusive style of old-fashioned instrumental Christmas carols. I have wrapped maybe a dozen presents and am already SICK OF IT. I tried to read two separate Christmas books, both which came highly recommended by people I trust, and neither of them were a good fit for my reading style/current mood. We have NO SNOW, just wind, wind, and more wind. We finally put up the tree and the Christmas decorations, and somehow even they seem lackluster, even though they are the exact same decorations I put out every year.

I feel a certain level of frustration (with myself) over this lack of holiday spirit. Also, woe. I LOVE Christmastime, and I feel it slipping away from me, and I’m concerned that this is the last Christmas that will be Magical for Carla, which makes me want to swaddle myself in Holiday Joy that is on a high, dark shelf somewhere I cannot reach. Fretting about it does not help, of course; I cannot GUILT-TRIP Christmas spirit upon myself. I thought I could coax it to me with gentleness and patience, like getting a skittish cat to come up from under the couch, but so far that hasn’t worked either.  

The only Coping Thought that is working for me (currently) is that Christmas Spirit isn’t MANDATORY. There’s no law. I have done my best to do the things that will make Christmas happy for my loved ones and I can finish the last tasks I need to do but there is no law that I have to be cheery or feel awed by the season or cherish every moment. It’s disappointing, but trying to FORCE spirit upon myself is not working, so I am trying to let go. Maybe it will find me if I stop looking so hard.

In the meantime, here are a few utterly mundane updates on a variety of things. 

Christmas Tree Skirt: I ordered the Christmas tree skirt I loved from my recent post and it has since arrived. I like it even more in person than online. The fabric is kind of stiff and heavier than I anticipated, which I quite like; I don’t think presents are going to crumple it or displace it. (It did get some stubborn folds in it during shipping, but I think time and gift gravity will smooth those out.) I LOVE the red version, but I kind of wish I had the burlap one, too. Maybe someday I will be the type of person with two trees and I can get the burlap one as well.

Holiday To-Do List: Just two weeks ago, I was in a bit of a panic over all I had yet to complete. Here is a list of what I had yet to do:

I can make a nice tidy list of things we have yet to complete:

Address and mail holiday cards

Finalize purchases for Carla’s “rilly big box full of all craft stuf”

Wrap and mail gifts for sister-in-law and niece

Mail caramels to my brother and sister-in-law whenever they get here

Buy the final gift for my mother

Buy the final gift for my father

Buy all gifts for my mother-in-law

Buy all gifts for my father-in-law (including birthday gifts)

Buy all gifts for my aunt-in-law

And now, I have completed every single item on that list. Plus, I have wraps all the gifts and packed them in boxes and put them in the mail. All that’s left is to wrap gifts for my family (and on behalf of Santa). A good reminder that there is usually plenty of time to do what needs to be done. Also that panicking publicly on one’s blog is quite useful for stimulating action.

Box Office Breakdown: When last I showed you a photo of my office, it was cram-jammed with boxes. I was saving the boxes so that I had The Perfect Size for the gifts I needed to send to relatives. This was kind of ridiculous, considering I only needed four boxes. But they are gone now! Broken down (by my husband!!!) and recycled! 

My office is usable once again. Hooray!

Coffee Experiment: I ended my experimentation with drinking coffee after two days of drinking coffee. Coffee is not for me. Instead, I have been making matcha lattes with occasional forays into Christmas tea, which is a very gentle, fragrant way to enable the Christmas spirit to enter my soul should it choose to. 

I just ordered a box of Stash Christmas in Paris tea to try in addition to the Twinings. “Luxurious chocolatey flavor paired with lavender and mint”? Yes, please!

Anniversary Dinner: My husband and I decided that we just weren’t comfortable eating in a restaurant quite yet, so we got “fancy takeout” (this means I ordered short ribs and my husband ordered chicken Milanese and we also each got an appetizer, instead of getting our usual pizza/Indian food/Thai food takeout) and took it back to our house where we watched football while Carla was at a birthday party. It was a surprisingly fun, lovely way to spend our anniversary. Plus, we got (“got”) to wait in the lobby of the restaurant for a few minutes while the kitchen prepared our order, and observed all the unmasked people coming in to dine there, and listened to how snarky and unpleasant the three (three!) hostesses were, and witnessed a disgruntled diner gripe to one of the hostesses about how he’d been waiting at a table for fifteen minutes and no one had come to serve him yet, even though someone had waited on a table that was just seated. It gave me just enough taste of Being In A Restaurant to realize that I have no desire to be in a restaurant perhaps ever again. 

Also, I got flowers!!! (And chocolates. They are both from my mother-in-law, but that doesn’t dampen their beauty.)

Dog Gifting: Carla would like to make special holiday treats for all her neighborhood dog friends. I have googled “homemade dog treats” several times, which turns up lots of recipes, many of which include peanut butter. But then some websites say that dogs can be allergic to peanut butter. Or gluten. I feel like we would KNOW if any of the dogs on our gift list had special needs. That seems like the kind of information that comes up, when you are a dog person. Right? But maybe not? I don’t know. My best guess is that we should just pick a recipe, make it, distribute the dog treats, and then the owners will decide if they want to feed it to their dogs or throw them away. It definitely seems like the perfect “It’s the thought that counts” kind of situation. But I don’t know! I’m not a dog owner!

If you are a dog owner/expert, would you allow your dog to eat a treat containing peanut butter? Perhaps I should stick to a different “flavoring.” But the other flavors include things like banana and sweet potato. Do dogs like bananas and sweet potatoes? Am I overthinking this? I am overthinking this. 

Awkwardness: Thank you for your support and kindness in response to my post about being the most awkward human on the planet. I am mostly over it. I have since spoken to several of the moms involved in my big foot-in-mouth incident the other day, and they seemed friendly and normal and the subject never even came up. 

What are you up to, this last weekend before Christmas? If you also have to brave Costco, you have my solidarity and sympathy.

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Dog Birthday Party

Happy Thanksgiving, to all those who are celebrating today! I am going to be cooking for part of the day, and swimming in a blissful lake of mashed potatoes and gravy for the rest of it, but before I dive in…

Did I tell you that Carla was invited to a dog’s birthday party?

I believe I have documented thoroughly just how obsessed Carla is with dogs. We are the luckiest people in the universe because we have seventeen dogs on our cul-de-sac (we can’t have many more houses than that; some households have multiple dogs). Carla knows them all by name. She is not quite so good with their humans. But I am familiar with our nearer neighbors, and so I have been trying to teach her to greet the human neighbors by name and to ask after their health before she turns her attention to the dogs. It’s a little perfunctory, with many of the neighbors, but I would say she has developed good relationships with several of them. One is a grandmother-type, who is lovely and sweet, and who allows Carla to walk her very well-trained cockapoo (while she walks alongside them). Another is an empty nester (Lynn) who enjoys kids.

(P.S. Lynn is the type of woman whom I want to be my best friend. She is outgoing and friendly and kind. She has a strong faith that is clear but not evangelical, she works in a social-services type career that I admire, she makes AMAZING baked goods. She has four grown kids, and LOVES having a big family. I get the feeling that having them all home from college during the pandemic was a joy for her, and that it has been really hard to have them all leave her at once this year. She is the kind of person who treats you like a friend even when you don’t actually know her that well, and I wish there were some manual for upgrading from Neighbor Who Entertains My Kid Sometimes to Bestie.)

Lynn has a beautiful, well-trained golden retriever named Barbara. Carla loves Barbara almost as much as she loved my parents’ late golden doodle. And Lynn is very lenient about allowing Carla to play with Barbara on their lawn. I can watch Carla from across the street, so I usually sit outside and write or read while keeping an eye on Carla.

Anyway, it was Barbara’s birthday recently, and Lynn let us know in advance and said she would be having a party for Barbara. Carla immediately wanted to buy a present for Barbara, so we went to the store one day after school and she looked through all the options, haggled with me on budget, and finally chose an appropriate gift. Once home, she wrapped the present and made Barbara a lovely card.  Please recall that Barbara is a dog.

The day of the party, Carla could talk of nothing else. What time was the party? When would Lynn be home from work? Could Barbara come over to our backyard? (No.) Lynn, of course, had normal adult-human things that delayed her and so was an hour later than she thought she’d be; very easy to understand as an adult, but less so for a child frantic to celebrate.

At LAST we got word that Lynn and Barbara would be home for the party! Carla grabbed the gift and the card (Barbara is still a dog) and we headed over. Carla helped Barbara open the gift. Lynn read the card out loud. Then Carla and Barbara played with the brand-new squeaky hamburger, Lynn allowed Carla to give her some treats, and we took lots of pictures, and Lynn handed us some cookies. That was the party. It was entirely for Carla’s benefit.

I feel so incredibly lucky to have such wonderful neighbors. Neighbors who are friendly and kind. Neighbors who understand Carla’s love for their pets and indulge her by bringing their dogs out for pets and walks and games of fetch. Neighbors who stage canine birthday parties purely for the joy it brings my little girl.