Sock Wars

The Den regularly eats socks. It eats an astonishing number of socks. I just bought literally eighteen pairs of little girl socks, in addition to the $DEITY knows how many socks were already in the house.

So you can imagine my surprise when Eldest, after dawdling around for ten minutes upstairs while we stood at the door waiting for her, came downstairs and announced in tones of great exasperation: “There is a major sock shortage around here!”

How can this be? And yet it appears to be so. The child is out of socks.

Well.

After I dropped them off, I cleared out the inside of the van. Four pairs of socks, two of them Eldest’s, and three mate-less socks.

Then I moved through the house, cleaning up the debris left by the Denizens over the weekend.

Playroom: Five mate-less socks crammed between sofa cushions. One pair in a toy drawer.

Kitchen: One pair of socks on floor under table.

Front room: FIVE PAIRS of socks strewn on and under chairs. Eight mate-less socks tucked under the sofa and behind the wine rack (I don’t want to know how they got there).

But wait, there’s more!

Upstairs under beds: FIFTEEN mate-less socks. FIFTEEN! And an awful lot of their summer wardrobe, to boot. Question: WHY? Why are my children going to all the work of shoving their clothing under their beds, when the laundry basket is right there?

In the laundry basket: Four rolled up (as in, unworn since last washing) pairs. And about six million unwashed pairs, which were at least where they belonged. But still. I figure from the sheer volume of socks I found in their laundry basket that each child has worn about six pairs of socks per day since I last did laundry.

Upstairs in Eldest’s closet: The remainder of all her socks. In ones and twos. Under approximately thirty eight pounds of construction paper and clothes hangers.

Sigh.

So I say to myself, “Might as well do a load or two (or five) of laundry while I’m at it.” We had a houseguest this weekend, there’s extra linens to be washed…

And I start sorting the laundry baskets.

And I discover someone whose name rhymes with My Husband put a piss-sodden something into the downstairs laundry basket sometime early in the filling phases of same. As well as some damp towels, which somehow I suspect were used to handle the associated mess that created the piss-sodden something.

The entire bottom quarter of the laundry basket is damp and extremely aromatic. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!

On the one hand, I’m glad I decided to do laundry today. Given another day or two, that would have been a mold-fest I shudder to even think about.

On the other hand…He’s a smart guy. He knows that if you put wet cloth between layers of dry cloth, the wet cloth will not dry and will, in point of fact, transfer its wetness to the layers of formerly-dry things. And then this green spotty mold will develop all over everything in the laundry basket and we’ll have to throw out a few hundred bucks worth of stuff – because there is no power on earth that can get that green mold stain out. Not even bleach can touch it. It’s more permanent than telemarketing calls.

So may I ask: What gives? What is up with this?! Seriously! He’s smarter than this. He really is. He knows you can’t put wet things, especially pee-wet things, into the bottom of the laundry basket and expect anything good to come of it!

Argh!

I’m thinking of my mom today. Remembering how she used to go on the occasional rampage around the house, shrieking about all the extra work we were making for her. “Who spit toothpaste on the carpet? Who put a sock in the chandelier? Who left their blocks in the middle of my bed? Why is there a half-eaten chocolate bar in the dog’s dish?! WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ME A CRAZY PERSON?!?!”

Hmm. That reminds me. I didn’t check the chandelier for socks…