For those of you who deal with the laundry, or have dealt with the laundry during pregnancy or whatever, I need some advice.

My clothing all goes in the washer, then it goes in the dryer. Sure, I sort it by color, but it's always the same simple, two step process. My wife's clothing, on the other hand, comes with all kinds of special instructions that I sometimes think are just there to make the clothing seem more delicate and, therefore, more expensive. I want some real-world translations for the following care instructions:

Hand Wash - Seriously? My washing machine has a delicate cycle; shouldn't that be enough? Or do I really need to jaunt down to the nearest mountain stream and gently launder these with lilac and unicorn dust?

Lie flat to dry - Ok, so about half of my wife's clothing seems to say this. Where am I supposed to find the space to lie an entire load of laundry flat? Do these clothing manufacturers assume I own a tennis court? Are the clothes supposed to double as wall-to-wall carpet while they dry? Who has this much space?

Line dry - I'm sorry, but I live in a townhouse with an HOA that forbids line drying. Also, I don't live in a Tide commercial. And, most importantly, I own a drying machine. And it's raining out.

Do you guys really read all of those little tags? Do you abide by them? And why is it that the clothes I like to see her in most have the most labor-intensive instructions?

I'm really close to getting all Darwin on her wardrobe, so any cautionary tales should come quickly.

Thanks, guys!

What is called for here is a simple matter of re-training your wife. The objective is to alter her behavior (buying clothes that require special attention) in the most gentle but direct method possible.

There are two possible tactics here.

Frontal assault (aka Darwinian)

Wash and dry everything as you would your own stuff. The strong will survive.

Flanking (aka passive aggressive)

Only wash the things that are machine washable. Take the articles requiring special attention and shove them down in the bottom of the hamper, or hide them under the bed. Over time she will acclimate to only wearing easy-care items. This avoids actually destroying the unwanted items, but still sends a persistent message.

If you are successful, she'll be back to wearing nothing but those grey sweats from college before you know it!

I do the laundry in our house. So I DO THE LAUNDRY. Which means, if you need to do it differently, then YOU do it. For me, 3 steps: washer, dryer, fold. That's it.

If there are special steps for a certain garment... it should not be put in the "laundry" and isn't my responsibility either way. I don't hand wash, I don't flat dry. If it's ruined because of the 3 step process, oh well.

If ya tell me there's a stain, I'll pretreat it, or maybe even if I notice it. And generally, if I pretreat it, I check it before it hits the dryer to see if it needs a second treatment. But if ya don't tell me about it, don't count on me seeing it. I sort and wash as quickly as I can.

The key for me is TheWife understands this policy. And knows if she has something that requires "dry cleaning" or special hand washing, then it's all hers. There are several things that say this on the tags, she has said, just wash 'em... and they've been fine. So you may be right on the BS factor of those tags.

I also don't put away her or TheBoy's clothes. I know where MINE go, so they'll eventually hit the drawers. The drawback here is that she and TheBoy live out of the laundry baskets for weeks on end. My neurosis hasn't yet demanded that I get destination maps for theirs, but I feel it's coming, particularly if ever I want only one basket in the bedroom... It's irritating, but "choose your battles wisely" man.

Daddy Clay and Concretin, uou guys are sexist brutes. This woman is bearing seanonymous' kids!

I say wait it out.

Once the pregnancy is over, the wardrobe will probably change anyway. If the wardrobe fails to change, then take the "Flanking (aka passive aggressive)" approach. You may choose to further optimize this approach by sending all delicates to the dry cleaner, and then posting all dry cleaning receipts on the refrigerator. For extra points, use a yellow highlighter to circle the total amount on each dry cleaning receipt.

While an excellent approach, Sean, I encourage you to check your insurance to see if they cover "yellow-highlighter-ectomies" because it's liable to end up lodged somewhere rather unpleasant.

The Flanking maneuver sounds risky. If she finds a hidden stash of all the fancy-schmancy frilly clothes and the designer stuff, I might be confronted with the question, "do you not think I look good in those anymore?"

I think I'm going to put concretin_nik's experience to use and start slipping a few of the sturdy looking things through the machines. I imagine they won't all come apart in the first trip through the dryer, so if I experience any casualties I can scale back a bit.

There are a lot of things that I'm fairly sure won't survive the dryer, though, and a lot of them have the 'lay falt to dry' nonsense on the tag. This is fine if it's just one or two, but after a couple of consecutive weekends out of town we can get a bit of a log jam. Surely there's some modern alternative to actually lying this stuff out flat somewhere. (This is complicated by the fact that, if we do leave things on a bed or something to dry, our long-haired cats will instantly appear on top of them and shed like frightened porcupines.) I've scoured Ikea's website and I'm pretty sure that if they don't have a solution, it doesn't exist. But am I missing something?

What about this: If they go trough the dryer, they shrink, and if they dry on a hanger they stretch. So if I alternate between the dryer and hangers, it'll all work out. Right?

My wife doesn't care what the label says. If it doesn't survive the wash, it's toast.

But if she did, I think we'd be likely to have a bin for the dry cleaner. That's their job. But let her take it and pick it up. The cost seems like it would discourage either the wash phobia or the purchase of those clothes.

I need to take my tux in before our last concert of the season. Thanks for reminding me.

You could make this into choreplay and ask her to show you how to take care of these unusual items (especially if she is still wearing them).

For those hand wash items, They make a sink for that its a whirlpool tub for your clothes.

mtiwhirlpools.net/index.php?prodsearch=A...mbersearch=MTLS-110J

Dan

2-3 stepper.

I do most of the laundry in our home and it usually follows the 3-step method of wash-dry-fold. However, some of my wife's garments (at least 85%) are "delicate". So I simply omit the dryer step and hang them to dry wherever I can. I too live in a place where line-drying is frowned upon. So, I use hangers and hang the items in question on the shower curtain bar for a few hours. We have a window in the bathroom so sunlight-breeze comes in. Once that's full, I resort to door handles, the tops of doors, chair-backs and whatever I can find. Usually does the trick.

Seems like lots of Dads here do the Laundry.
Me too.
Anyone have the Pet Peeve of hearing the old stereotype about how Wives/mothers do ALL the housework for their lazy families?
Hate it.


So for me...
Handwash = Delicate ( I'll even do light and dark delicates)

Line dry = put on clothes rack in laundry room.
We actually have a line outside for the warmer months that is mostly for the reusable diapers.
And as of right now, ours need a serious dose of sunshine.

She has a few of those 'lay flat' clothes that are her nice maternity clothes that I am putting up with only because they are maternity clothes and I see this as a short-term deal. Anything else that needs special care goes to the dry-cleaners and neither of us wear very often anyway.

And Concretin, I'm with you on the hamper alerts.
There can be no expectation that I will check any clothes going between the hamper and the wash.
Pens, rolled-up socks, cash, etc need to be taken care of by the owner/wearer of clothes.

I will wash/dry/fold. And by the way, that will all happen on my schedule, thank you very much.

I do the laundry in our family. I used to line dry most things, so the clothes would last longer, but now that I'm married w. a baby I've succumbed to the siren song of the dryer.

I dry most things on medium or low heat, unless it's something heavy duty (towels, diapers, sheets, etc).