Please don't make me wash the sheets!

It’s no secret – I hate to wash sheets. I’m not sure why but the whole process of taking off a set of sheets - tugging on the pillows until they come out of the cases, having to remove the comforter so I can get to the bottom sheet, blah, blah, blah – really drives me crazy. All the steps of getting the sheets off the bed are just a huge hassle and then having to stuff it all in the washing machine (we have an older averaged size washer/dryer…maybe one day we will get a new-fangled fancy set but not anytime soon as our old set works just fine.) and then having to put it all back on the bed when the sheets are clean….UGH! It is a process that just completely annoys me!

I’m not sure what was going on earlier this week but I think my kids were secretly conspiring against me to get me to wash their sheets. On Sunday afternoon my husband left for a business trip and things were going smoothly until about 3:00am on Monday morning. I woke up to Sarah screaming, “It’s wet in here! There’s water in my bed!”. I trudged into her room and was trying to quickly figure out why there was water in her room. My thoughts were garbled since it was 3:00am but I was trying to eliminate potential causes before I got to her room.

Hmmm…Water? Did it rain into her room? That couldn’t be it since it hasn’t rained around here since 1987.

Did a pipe leak? No there really aren’t any water pipes leading into her room. That couldn’t be it.

Oh no, I thought when I stepped into her room….she has peed in her bed! You have got to be kidding me! She never pees in the middle of the night. She always wakes up dry and of course, of course I just stopped putting her in pull-ups three nights before. She has been potty trained since January but I have always put her in pull-ups just in case she has a night time accident. But she NEVER does and she ALWAYS wakes up dry so I decided to stop wasting money on the pull-ups and just put her to bed in her underwear since she NEVER needs to pee in the middle of the night and since she ALWAYS wakes up dry.

But alas, 3:00am on Monday morning she had an accident. She was scared and she didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t scared. I was just annoyed. Now I’m going to have to actually wash her sheets. Grrrr…. Well, I’m not washing her sheets at 3:00am, I thought. My husband wasn’t at home. I didn’t want to have to turn on all the lights, go through the hassle of getting the dirty sheets off, put on clean ones and then try to get my daughter back to sleep so I did what any laundry hating, sleep loving mother would do at 3:00am. I cleaned her bottom with a wash cloth in the dark, quickly changed her pajamas, put towels down over the wet spots and tucked her back into bed. It was 3:06 am, she was asleep and all was well except that I knew that first thing in the morning I was going to have to wash her sheets. I tossed and turned for the rest of the night.

On Tuesday morning my son bounded down the stairs and into the office where I was reading email, paying bills, drinking my coffee, and he says, “Good morning!" Then he proceeded to take off his pajama bottoms and his underwear. I asked him what the heck he was doing and he calmly said, “My underwear is wet.”

“Your underwear is wet? Did you spill some milk or water on it?”, I asked with a sinking feeling knowing full well that he had not had any milk or water yet that morning.

“No. I think I peed in my bed. Can I have my breakfast now?”

What?? He peed in his bed?! This can’t be happening to me. Peter is 4 and a half! He’s been potty trained for the last two years and stopped wearing pull-ups to bed a long, long time ago. He’s great about getting up in the middle of the night if he has to go so why, oh, why did he pee in his bed? The kids must be conspiring against me. They must sense that I hate washing sheets. They know that Daddy is out of town and Mommy is already on edge so let’s see if we can push her over it. Won’t that be fun to watch?

Or maybe they both realized that wetting the bed is the only way to get clean sheets around here. And who can blame them? There is nothing nicer than sliding down into crisp clean sheets that have been tightly pulled into place. And who doesn’t love how hospital corners look right after clean sheets have been put onto a bed? Peter probably even got spoiled by staying at my mother’s house because my mom IRONS her sheets! IRONS her sheets, people!!! Come to think of it my mother-in-law irons her sheets, too! I don’t even iron my clothes much less my sheets!!

I know my husband likes fresh clean sheets too. I just hope he chooses a better way to let me know he would like the dirty ones washed!