laundry woes

So today was another crazy laundry day. I was on top of things though and was even cleaning bathrooms in between loads. I came downstairs after cleaning the kids bathroom, which by the way is simply a disgusting job. I came downstairs to inform the kids they could start cleaning their own bathroom, when I found Matt and Ella on top of the dryer tossing dried pinto beans into the washer.

And if this wasn't bad enough, I then noticed that my dryer was making noises no dryer should ever make. A very slow grinding noise, like it was just running out of energy to spin.

"What are you guys doing!?" I hollered and then quickly opened the dryer to find a large, pink, princess, beach ball wedged up inside the drum. I dislodged the ball and prayed that my dryer wasn't permanently scarred. No such luck. When I tried to restart it nothing happened. I just stood there and cried. I tried a few minutes later, and a few minutes later again, and nothing.

There I was with two wet loads and 4 more loads to wash. And no way to dry any of it. I knew most of friend's dryers would be busy with their own clothes as they do laundry on the same day as me. I had visions of dragging all three kids and mountains of wet clothes to some ghetto laundromat and cried some more.

I took a deep breath and reassessed the situation. One of my wet loads was bedding which I could easily dry outside and the other was mainly t shirts and shorts which also could dry in the sunshine. The other 4 loads could wait...

So I dug out some cording, my bag of clothespins and set to work. I quickly discovered why the dryer was invented. It took over 45 minutes to hang up just two loads of laundry on my makeshift clothesline. But they were up and it was warm and breezy and the mindless task calmed me down enough to go and deal with the kids again. At which point Matt came out to announce that the dryer was now working just fine (I guess it just needed to cool down -thank goodness) and why was I outside working so hard?