"3 Men and a Lady - What's the Odds?"

H

ey everyone – It’s Friday. With the exception of a slight headache that I get periodically, I have still managed to accomplish the usual Friday morning tasks. Laundry is all done and I am proud to know that I had even took it upon myself, a month ago, to stop the never ending saga of "WHERE'S ALL THE JEANS?" What? You mean you have never heard of this saga? Well, well, my dear readers pull up a chair and sit down as I tell you this glorious tale of how 3 Men and a Lady - fit into one pair Jeans.

Now I will say, that yes,  I was getting rather tired of constantly washing , in a king size washer, two loads of laundry that consisted of 15 pairs of jeans, each, that would suddenly disappear before I even get them out of the dryer.  Even if I had washed them during the day, and had them folded and in three equal piles, I found that when one of my three men in this house went to get his pile, he would skim off the other two that always left the others in the house scrounging for their pair. Now this has been going on for the last two years. It is a blessing and a curse. What do I mean by that you ask? You see, my husband, my two boys, and now myself, all wear the same size jeans...what's the odds of that? However being a good thing on the wallet, it's a bad thing when they are all fighting for their favorite pair. My husband prefers dark boot cut jeans; my oldest son prefers any jeans and will acquire them from the others, when his are dirty and have not made it to the laundry basket. I have caught him in the act, with his extreme quickness, going into their closets or dressers to retrieve them from my husband or younger son, lurking in the shadows, walking swiftly and quietly, and peering around so not to get caught. My youngest son, he likes medium blue in color, but prefers a more standard cut vs. the boot cut dark blue jeans that I buy for my husband and oldest son.

But after a few washing and wearing, something bad happens in this house, all the jeans begin to look alike and soon a bigger issue develops - whose jeans are whose? Another problem we face and I know you will relate to this – We all have that favorite pair that we wear over and over, you know the ones, nicely faded, soft but not to broken in, and the zipper still works. But what happens when those favorite jeans are found on someone else? MADNESS! CHAOS! DRAMA! It starts a war, a big war, and believe you me; there is nothing worse than three men bitching about who has who’s jeans, first thing in the morning. Now I don’t have a clue why my brain had not thought of a solution earlier, maybe I thought it would somehow work itself out, maybe one of them would gain more weight and another would lose weight, but unfortunately that hasn’t happened yet and suddenly I was thinking. If my clue had to be broadcasted on the news this is probably what you'd hear - In the news today, local house wife finally gets a flippin’ clue and stops the jean drama, but the question still remains - Does her blonde hair color really come from a box? More news at 11.  My superbulous idea - Why not put an end to this saga once and for all and put names on the tags inside…BINGO! This Mama got a clue!

 I began with a strategic maneuver that I would like to call the "sniffing them out" approach which involved going into the rooms of my two teen age boys. My younger son, his room is very tidy and he is very good about getting his dirty items into the basket just outside of the bathroom. So I will say I was rather disappointed when I discovered that there were no jeans, clean or dirty, in his room. It was obvious to me that someone else was harboring an excessive amount and I was going to find every pair if it took me an hour. Once I rounded up any pair that didn’t have a man’s body in them, Yes, I know this may sound more on the extra extreme side of things, but a mama has to do, what a mama has to do. I even went as far as not only labeling all jeans in the house, including mine, I did socks and underwear too – That my friends was a feat far too graphic to write about and trust me, a man’s underwear should stay a mystery and be colored not tighty whites. Something about the white cotton briefs, all I can think of is the quote from Forest Gump when we used to have men’s white underwear in the house - "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get" - unless it is boxers with humorous prints on them. Hey I kept it clean - Wink.  All I can say is that if you happen to stumble onto a pair of underwear or socks on your seventeen year old floor, assume they are dirty and leave it at that. I learned the hard way on a pair of sock. OMG! I should have been wearing an instant alert medical device to save me from the toxic exposure. I can still hear it in my head, robot from the old television show “Lost in Space” - “DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER! DANGER!”

I think it was about two weeks before I was able to smell again. Ok, I may have over exaggerated – Smile. It has now been about a month and laundry detail is exceptionally easy. You don’t even have to think, but still it is either my husband or I, that folds the laundry. Even through everything is labeled, once in a great while, someone forgets to get their jeans into the laundry bin. When this happens you know that the jean bandit will strike again and this house is thrown back into the jean drama plague.

So my words of wisdom today – Don’t be a jean thief, always keep your laundry done, and be sure to label all your clothes. Nothing worse than fearing you’re going to have to go to work in shorts, sweats or naked if you’re that behind in your laundry or the jean thief has made his way into your home. Have a FANTASTIC FRIDAY! Blog ya’ll later.