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| the type of bed you never need to make! |
I was just reading Kirsa's blog and her amusing post about scatter cushions and she mentioned something about bed making that got me thinking.
Do you make your bed? Every morning without fail? My poor bed gets awfully neglected. If it's lucky - and most of the time it's not - I'll flick the covers up over it. If we have visitors I'll make a bit more of an effort and return the second pillow to the bed and make the doona all neat looking but underneath the sheet is still usually all twisted. Really, I haven't properly made my bed in the morning since boarding school where we got in trouble if we didn't. I'm wondering if there's a point in my life where I will go back to proper bed making? Will it be when I have kids and I want them to make their beds so I have to lead by example? Or is bed making a lost chore?
When I was younger, some of my jobs were to make my bed every morning, dry the dishes as Mum washed them and when I was old enough to be trusted around an iron, iron the hankies and tea towels. Now, I certainly do not dry the dishes these days. We do not yet have the luxury of a dish washer but once the dishes are washed they get left to drain on the dish rack and put away once air dried. In my opinion, unless you have guests and a shitload of dishes, drying dishes is an immense waste of time. Similarly, ironing tea towels falls into that same category. It's like ironing sheets. Why would you do it? (Although I certainly know quite a few crazy people who do.) And who uses hankies these days apart from old men? Yuck.
Now, not having kids myself I don't know how things are looking on the chores front. I like to think most families still have their kids helping around the house although from an anecdote my sister told me when she took a bunch of private school teenage boys on a ski trip over east and they had to help out with the chores in the dormitory and one of them asked how to turn on the vacuum cleaner I have an inkling this may not be the case everywhere. I'm sure though that where chores are happening, drying the dishes may have been superseded by emptying the dishwasher. And I'm curious, what other new chores there are out there these days that we all wouldn't have done when we were young? And what chores have been relegated to the "when I was your age" stories?
5 comments:
I confess...I'm a bed maker, well at least on the weekend. During the week I have been known to leave it unmade knowing/hoping my husband will make it. Which he does (most of the time) where he takes great pleasure in arranging the pillows on the bed in a rather odd arrangement, just to wind me up.
Thank you for mentioning my post, so glad you got a giggle and provokes some thoughts!
I was like you until vey recently, hardly ever made my bed and when I did it was for visitors.
But then I rediscovered the gloriousness of clean sheets and made beds (I lost this when I had kids). I now make my bed everyday, smoothing out the sheets and plumping the pillows. And of course carefully arranging the scatter cushions :-)
I whoosh the doona over the bed but often two Labradors play on the bed and things go askew!! Anyway, there's likely to be a nap during the day. My job was to sprinkle the washing with water and roll it up before it was ironed. We didn't have a steam iron so my dad made holes in the lid of a vinegar bottle and I would shake water on things and then roll them up a little while before my mum was ready to iron. I also loved lighting the incinerator. A lot!!
I don't make the bed properly but I do throw the doona up over it all every morning... mainly because my favourite thing to do when I come home from work is throw myself on top of it and lay there for a minute!!! If the bed is totally unmade, it isn't quite as enticing haha
For several months, making the bed has been WAY down on my list of priorities each day. But lately, I've been making more of an effort and when Paul gets up and jumps in the shower, I'm trying to make it part of my morning routine to make the bed before it's my turn for the bathroom. I feel so much better on the days when I look down the hallway and see our bed all nicely made AND there's nothing like a beautiful, freshly made bed to jump into at night.
As for chores, I was a teatowel/hankie ironer too :) Thesedays, no drying here (SUCH a waste of time). I just pop anything I've hand washed away in the morning when they're dried. I barely iron much thesedays either, I try hard to fold or hang anything as soon as I get it off the line (doens't always work that way) but with kids clothes especially, what's the point in ironing them? Grace is still fairly little so her main 'chores' are putting away her toys, a task which I'm trying REALLY hard to work on with her lately. I've also been getting her to put her plate or bowl and cutlery in the dishwasher after she's eaten.
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