What Kind of Laundry Person Are You?

What kind of laundry person are you? Do you usually only get one sock in the laundry basket? Is your shirt almost always inside out when it gets washed? Are you upset if your shirt wasn’t inside out when it got put into the wash? Do you put your shirt and undershirt in the laundry bin while they are somehow still stuck together? Or do you just wear the same seven shirts each week? My wife says I am usually all of these rolled into one. Recently, we had our first child. Now the socks are smaller and easier to lose. The little shirts that are inside out usually have poop on them from a blowout. And it feels like he wears all twenty-seven shirts he has in only three days.

Honestly, my wife was tired of my laundry. Now she is really tired of laundry. I am an attorney, and luckily, I do not have a trial for two weeks. So, I am going to give laundry a try this week. I will get to scrub the extra poop off little Joey’s shirts, and I will get to try to figure out how my undershirt gets so caught up in my other shirt. The week will pass, and I will be mostly successful. Seriously though, where do all those socks disappear too?

Then, the week of the trial is almost here. I go into trial prep mode, which basically means blocking out everything and maybe seeing little Joey for a few minutes each day. I am defending some twenty-year-old kids that stole lawn ornaments and dropped them off in somebody’s yard as a prank. The owner of the ornaments didn’t press charges but decided to go to civil court, saying one of the ornaments was worth thousands of dollars. The funny thing is the kids really stole some average plastic flamingos and garden gnomes, and all of their parents are so rich, they could have bought hundreds of lawn ornaments on their own. Since their parents are rich though, I would like to win this one and be able to represent their parents with bigger cases in the future or handle their estate planning or something.

The thing about babies is you never know when they are actually going to sleep or decide to stay awake. I like my sleep, especially during trial prep, but my wife was really having a tough time with little Joey that week. So, I decided to try to help. The night before the trial little Joey was up every hour. He wasn’t hungry, didn’t need to burp, and didn’t want his pacifier. I obviously don’t know what he did want, but he certainly didn’t want to stay asleep. I was starting to get a little impatient. (My wife says I am always a little impatient. So maybe I was getting very impatient.) I walked in at 3:00 AM. Little Joey was making noise on the monitor and woke me up again. I walked in quite upset, ready to give a three-month-old an earful in my best legalese. I stumbled to the side of the crib, trying to get the sleep out of my eyes and curses off my tongue. I looked down at his little face, illuminated in the green light from the baby monitor power light. Joey looked up at me and gave me the biggest smile of his short life.

I don’t remember how I slept the rest of that night. I don’t know how I got through the lawn ornament trial on so little sleep. Perhaps the ridiculousness of the case helped. The judge certainly wasn’t impressed with the civil suit, and I won easily. More importantly, I learned for the first time something I would learn more often as we had more kids and spent more time with them. Your day might suck, but they will give you a smile when you need it the most.