Cloth Sorting

My daughter helps me with laundry from time to time.   We have two types of laundry loads for the most part: white cloths and clothes with white cloths intermixed.   We use 13” square white cloths for mostly everything.   We have dozens and dozens of them in locations around the house.

Over time they get worn out.  Some get stains in them that won’t come out with bleach.  They get holes or fray on the edges and make a big fluffy mess in the lint trap of the dryer.   When our cleaning lady cleans the house she uses the cloths and then runs a specific load of laundry just for the cloths.   Whenever I run a load of clothes I add in all the dirty white cloths we’ve used in the general course of the day.

My daughter can help with a lot of the folding and sorting with laundry, but she’s the most adept at the cloths.   She will pile through all the laundry items, finds the white cloths and make a nice, neat stack.   Yesterday she was stacking white cloths from a full load of cloths and a second load of regular laundry.  

I went into the kitchen and was cleaning up when she came in, holding about seven cloths in her hands and said, “here, mom, these are the ones without tags.”   I told her thank you and followed her into the bedroom to see a huge stack of fifty or so cloths in another stack.   And I thought about what she’d just done.

I had replaced all our old cloths with the new ones.   But there are always outliers that I don’t catch.   It sometimes takes a few weeks to get all the old cloths retired.   I had told my husband that my plan was to leave the label on the new cloths until I didn’t have loads of wash with old cloths.   Apparently my daughter heard me say this.

So she took the cloths, felt around all four sides to see if there was a tag.  If there was, she put it in one stack.   If there was no tag, she put the cloth in a second stack.   This took time, but she could do it without seeing and she did it very well.    She surprises me with her tenacity and perseverance.

The Big Boy Update:  I saw my son scratching his penis last week so I asked him if he needed any medicine on it as it sometimes gets itchy due to eczema.   He replied, “no, I’m just messing with it because it’s cool.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter informed me yesterday, “the best thing about restaurants is that you make new friends.   Because there more than one person there.”   She had met a nice gentleman who was an architect eating alone at the table beside us.   He drew a picture of a house on a napkin and talked to us about Tesla cars and how much we liked ours.