I've been fighting a losing battle all week. The kids have been very good over the years about not leaving their stuff (other than their school backpacks during the school year) laying around the house. But something unusual has been going on this week. It's actually getting pretty ridiculous.
The first pair of dirty socks sat at the bottom of the back stairs for two straight days on Monday and Tuesday. I knew they were Jay's. I don't know how many times he went up and down those stairs over those two days but the socks never moved. Finally, when I went up to bed on Tuesday night, I decided to bring the socks upstairs with me. I carried them up to his room, pulled his bedspread back, and placed them on top of his pillow. I thought that might help him get the message. When I talked to him the next afternoon, though, he didn't seem fazed at all by finding the socks on his pillow.
Sure enough, on Wednesday there was another pair of dirty black socks at the bottom of the stairs. Certain that they were Jay's, I told him to bring his dirty socks upstairs. "They're not mine," he said. He went on to tell me that they belonged to his friend. I was stumped. Jay's friend hadn't even been to our house -- Jay had gone over to his house to hang out. How his friend's dirty socks made it to the bottom of our stairs is beyond me. When I came home from work yesterday, the socks were still there. We'd now gone almost 96 straight hours with a pair of dirty socks at the bottom of the stairs. I told Jay to put this second pair of socks in the laundry room and he reluctantly stopped texting, got up from the couch, and did that.
Everything finally seemed to be in order. I happily watched back-to-back episodes of "Selling New York" and then decided to go up to bed. I walked over to the back stairs and what did I see? A third pair of dirty black socks was now laying there. This time, they look like Hannah's. I stubbornly refused to walk past them. Instead, I turned around and headed to the front hall and took the front stairs up to bed. As I was climbing the front stairs, I wondered if those dirty socks would still be there when I came down in the morning. Since I'm posting this at 6:15AM before starting the day, what do you think?