Wednesday, August 26, 2009

A Shirt Story

Back when Dr. Love and I were preparing for marriage, one of the things we discussed was our budget. We both were working full-time and one of the things we included in the budget was the cost of taking his dress shirts to be done at the cleaners. We had an agreement that I would never have to iron his shirts.

After a year or so of marital bliss we decided that I would (could!) quit working and we worked on our budget again. Needless to say, one of the things that would have to get slashed was the cost of our dry cleaning. To me, ironing became a small price to pay for getting to stay home! So I purchased a nice iron and a wonderful over-sized ironing board.

That was five years ago. Thus begins my shirt saga. Now, Dr. Love has many shirts and for this I am eternally grateful. Because for some reason I can't keep up with the ironing! Is there enough time in the week? Yes. Do I enjoy having 10-15 shirts staring at me from the bottom of his hamper? No. Sometimes they get washed & hang for weeks in the laundry room all forlorn until I finally get around to pressing them. Sometimes the very last shirt is taken off the hangar from the closet one morning and the next morning I am hurriedly ironing a shirt from the laundry room toput on his back that day!

To add to this ironing chaos, my son now attends a school with a dress code. He must wear a collared shirt (tucked in and belted) every day. He's allowed to wear polo shirts except on chapel days when he must wear a tie. Does he wear polos? No. He prefers dress shirts. And I lobbied and willingly signed him up for this! The bright spot in this particular part of the shirt saga is that I am teaching him to iron for himself (something hubby can very well do but what kind of wife would I be if I allowed that?!). I've started small: he irons one of his shirts each time I'm ironing them. He's been warned that we'll be working up to his doing his own ironing. Ironically, he's worn a polo shirt every day this week!

It is with great pleasure that I direct your attention to the picture at the top of this post as there's a good end to my story: this morning I knocked out six shirts and,except for the shirt that Dr. Love is currently wearing at work, for the first time EVER I'm caught up!!!!! And lest you get the idea from the picture that I'm analytical, I arranged them by color to make you laugh.

Here's the cliffhanger: Will I work hard to stay caught up OR will I take eight weeks off? Tune in..............

1 comment:

cheryl said...

LOVED this post my friend! Two quick things to note...

1. It's good for Charlie to know how to iron shirt just incase the Lord gives him a big boy job far away when he grows up where he'll need to wear a collared shirt...and HE hasn't given him a wifey yet.

2. My Amy DOES organize her closet in color coded manner. What does this mean? ; )