A few weeks ago, after our great trip to Italy, Tyler promptly packed up and had to leave for over two weeks in Iceland. I was at home with the kids and feeling a bit daunted by the idea. But you know what, after a few days, it didn’t feel so overwhelming and we were all kind of in a little routine. And, I can’t believe it, but we were actually having fun! (Is that what it feels like to be moving out of the trenches of small children? If so, it’s all I hoped it could be!)

So here’s the point where I let you in on a private little nuance of our marriage: I don’t do laundry. It’s not because “I DO NOT DO LAUNDRY,” but it just kind of ended up being a division of labour we did when we were just married and have kept to it. We both have things we routinely tackle, and laundry is not on my radar. At all. Well, at least the cleaning of it. I’m very good at making things dirty.

While he was away, the culmination of a month’s worth of summer clothes from holiday and the start of school collided. Laundry had to be done. And I was in that groove of being alone with the kids, so I decided to start my first load of laundry in our washing machine.

It was actually super simple. In fact, it was so simple, I went a little crazy. I did load after load- kinda feeling awesome as I got through another batch and put all the pieces away…. Except I wasn’t love the quality of the laundry.

Now laundry here in England is just different. We have one small machine that does both washing and drying. We don’t enjoy the luxurious fluff cycle that makes clothes super warm and wrinkle-free. We, more or less, have to hang every item on a giant old Victorian rack that hangs above our bathtub for at least half a day to get it fully dry. So I’m used to a bit of wrinkles, crunchiness to our clothes. It’s just the difference between what clothes feel like when I wash them in the US and when I wash them here.

But these clothes just seemed dingy. They smelled amazing but they didn’t seem to get washed better.

I spot treated some. I opted to put the detergent straight on the clothes. I kept washing and resigned the situation to just a small tariff to life in London.

Well, Tyler got home and life returned to normal, but I was still keen to keep the laundry moving through the house at a rate that would impress the Swiss military.

One day as I sat perched on the little stairs leading down into the laundry room/tiny cupboard that is built out from the house- I moaned to Tyler that Viola’s school socks were still so gross looking and so dingy. He just shrugged it off and kept hanging up the recently washed items.

Then I asked him if he had a trick for keeping the detergent from building up in the dispenser. He replied, well it won’t ever do that because it’s the pods.

The pods? No, I was using the liquid detergent and I held up the bottle.

He looked at me with confusion. Then he explained to me that I was holding fabric softener.

And then I explained to him that I had been washing every single load with fabric softener for the past two weeks because that was what I thought was detergent… along with an extra cup of the other brand of fabric softener. And in that moment, all the lovely smelly, dingy clothes that I had been folding and smugly putting away suddenly made so much more sense. (In my defence, Tyler agrees that it is really poorly marked on the outside and is pretty confusing. It says very small on the back that it is fabric softener, but you have to be looking for it.)

I tossed everything back in the wash, tucked a pod at the bottom and restarted the load and haven’t stopped rolling my eyes at myself since. But hopefully, it makes you laugh and realise that each and every one of you is probably better at laundry than I am.. and to let you know that the reason I haven’t posted in a while is because I’ve been so busy doing domestic skills at low-caliber.

Anyone else have a great story of totally missing the mark like this? I’m really hoping to get some other votes of over-confidence here, so I’m gonna make this a competition. The winner of the funniest story gets a $10 Starbucks gift card. (I’ll award it on Friday.)

Don’t leave me out to dry (pun intended) on this one….