Cycles

So everyone has heard of the water cycle, and if I remember from my science days there is a nitrogen cycle. Around our house there are two common cycles ....the dish cycle and the laundry cycle.
Lately the dish cycle has been functioning pretty well. It is somewhat helped along by the fact that the dishwasher in this house appears to have the most inconvenient of arrangements for the bottom rack. I actually quite like the top rack, but the bottom rack is horrid. You put three dishes in and it is full...well perhaps that is an exagerration but not by much. SO therefore we run it fairly frequently and it is quick to load and unload.
Now the laundry cycle is a whole other story.
Somehow, starting last week I have gotten off on the whole wash, sort, fold, and hopefully get at least relatively close to putting in the appropriate drawers cycle. It seems to have all started when Jim twisted his ankle and in the process tore a pair of pants and suddenly had to change before going to work. From there, realizing that the man is hard on pants anyway, it became a survival thing to try and make sure that he had a clean pair for the next day (probably partly due to the fact that he has two or three pairs of pants in need of repair and I have been swamped between Ben the baby-sitter being sick and my own coursework).
This was probably further agrevated by the fact that the laundry basket in our room got moved into the laundry room and somehow never managed to find it's way home to the corner of our room. So therefore there were the piles of laundry waiting to be washed that were sitting on our floor, the piles of laundry in our room that were where we had put our clothes after the laundry basket had gone AWOL, and then various small clothing deposits around the house where small children with and without help had stripped various clothing items (the most common one being socks).
So it culminated in me getting ready to change the boy's diapers this morning and in fact wondering if I even had any clean pants to put them in. I knew that I had a huge number of clean shirts, but clean pants where a big question mark.

I did in fact find two pairs of clean pants, and made a huge push to get back on track with the laundry cycle. ...now if I could just find time to actually try and match up all of those wonderful kid's socks...somehow I didn't have any unmatched socks before I had children.