College Students and Laundry

Laundry.

Very few people love doing laundry, but it has to get done. In our home, when you turn 7 you get a big privilege - your own (supervised) email account - and a big chore: laundry. Our 7 year olds (we're on our third one) spend part of each Sunday gathering up our 3 baskets of laundry, sorting, washing, drying, carrying them back upstairs and then folding and putting away. When the next kid turns seven, you're excused from all but the folding and putting away. Yes, of course they've asked what we'll do when the littlest turns nine - I'm thinking of putting in coin-operated machines and letting each teen be on his own...

An eight year old can do laundry.

Yup. It takes a few months to really nail the skills to do this all with no help and few reminders. But by age 8, these boys each have it down. So imagine our surprise when one of the boys' babysitters (a college sophomore) said, "Wow! I can't even do laundry!" She said some schools do your laundry for free, though not the one she goes to now. Our kids were amazed and astounded. And I think she was pretty embarrassed. The boys asked things like: "What do you do when all your clothes are dirty?" "Did you know it's not that hard?" "Doesn't it feel like you're a pretty little kid if you still give your clothes to your Mom to wash?"  She said she didn't know how, but she'd ask her mom to teach her over the summer. And that's when our current eight year old thought it would be great to put a video on YouTube to teach college students. "So they don't have to bug their Moms."  Warms my heart...