Solving the Sock Problem

I used to regularly blog about what a domestic disaster I am. But there are only so many times you can talk about your dislike of cleaning before you find out that your neighbor reads your blog and doesn't want her kids to come over to your house anymore. Ahem.

But now I have something positive to share. I have solved my sock problem.

I gather from pop culture that we are not the only family that has a problem with missing socks. But I am sure we're the only family where there have been HUGE piles of socks scattered around the master bedroom for weeks at a time. You see, it wasn't that we'd have 3 or 4 missing socks each week. We would always have 30. But there weren't actually missing, they'd just gone through another load and were in another basket. Or something.

The only way I can get myself to fold laundry - or to pair socks - is to do it while I'm watching TV. So I would pile all the partnerless socks on the floor to await the next basket of clean laundry. Sometimes they were. Sometimes they weren't. Sometimes I couldn't even tell.

I tried having each member of the family have a certain type of sock, but that didn't work because different sports require different socks and so do different types of shoes. Next I tried having everyone match their own socks. That worked well, except when there were arguments about whose socks were whose. And except when it took them an hour to make 3 pairs. In desperation, I encouraged everyone to pair their socks BEFORE putting them in the wash.

That one might have worked, except that the socks didn't really get clean that way. And I was spending a lot of time yelling about sock pairing.

I really don't need any more reasons to yell. And I really like clean socks.

So then I had an epiphany. It probably won't seem like much of an epiphany to those of you who excel at domestic things, but please remember I have a low bar. I've screwed up pasta before.

Anyway, I now sort socks as soon as they come out of the dryer.

Ironflower's pile. 

I pull them out and pile them by owner. It makes it much easier to find pairs. It takes all of 5 minutes to go through each pile after a load. Then I just throw pairs into the clean laundry basket and bring them upstairs to be put away. No more giant piles in the bedroom!

I mean, we still have a lot of partnerless socks. And it's not like I've come up with a creative use for them. (Puppets? Cleaning rags? I'm not sure which way to go here.) But there's much less angst involved in the whole process.

Now if I could just figure out why most of the partnerless socks are Hugmonkey's.


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