So last night was a shit show

I only got half my Labour Day to do list completed. But that’s to be expected. The kids took forever going to sleep. That’s also to be expected. And the new lunch containers I bought are too big to fit in a standard lunch box. That one was a nice surprise.

BUT, I did find out that Mary’s first day of nursery school is today and not tomorrow which (given how much work I’ve put off until this week) is a saving grace for me.  I found a couple lunch bags that are stretchy enough to work. I even started packing school lunches by 10pm. A reasonable bedtime seemed to be within reach.

Look! I went all bento style because Irene’s not big on sandwiches, it’s her first year eating lunch at school and I wanted to make sure she’d eat something. That’s seven-cheese tortellini, by the way. Seven distinct cheese varieties, all smashed together into each individual tortellini. Haven’t we gone too far? Once upon a time there was only ricotta-filled pasta. Then some fancy pants started to blend two or three different cheeses together. It was ground-breaking. Soon enough you could buy a four-cheese tortellini at the supermarket. Gourmet! But seven? How about just one really good cheese? Once cheese that hits all the flavour and texture notes all by it’s lonesome. Now that would impress me.

Things started to derail when I decided to throw in one last load of laundry. There’s a small bin I keep off the kitchen for stray clothes I pick up around the house. (You wouldn’t believe how fast that thing fills up. Stop stripping in the living room, people!) So I threw those in the washer with some laundry from our camping trip I’d only just discovered in a sleeping bag carrying case. It wound up being a pretty full load; a good mixture of some of everybody’s favourite clothes.

But what was that smell?

Given that half the clothes had been tied up in a nylon bag for weeks and the other half contained at least two pairs of pee-soaked pants, I ran the wash on hot. As the wash cycle progressed and hot water filled the machine, a faint odour filled the laundry room. It was kind of musty and stale. I couldn’t quite place it. Something wet must have fallen behind the washing machine, I thought. I’d have to look into that later.

When the wash cycle was finished I opened up the machine and there was that smell again. I picked up various pieces of clothing and smelled them. They all smelled musty. Shoot. Maybe I should stop using unscented laundry detergent. I continued to bring the wet clothes up to my face. I pressed my nose against them and breathed deeply. There was no way around it. I was going to have to run this load through again.

I’d run it just as soon as I reached into the rubber folds near the front loader’s door and pulled out the kiddie socks stuck in there so they could be thrown back in the main tub. Cupping my fingers, I squeezed my hand into the fold and ran it from left to right. I felt something soft and slimy and glancing down I saw a little, dead mouse.

In a flash, I was across the room at the adjoining bathroom sink scouring my hands, Lady Macbeth-style, and screaming for Ed to please get rid of it. Oh god, oh god, oh god. I’d pressed my face right into those clothes. Dead mouse-smell molecules were clinging to the insides of my nose. It seemed to be caught in my throat. I thought I might choke on it.

Once the mouse was gone, I scrubbed out the rubber folds and the inside of the door. I added several scoops of Oxiclean to the clothes which is the only laundry product I have right now that’s not completely unscented. I filled up the detergent receptacle and ran a heavy duty wash cycle.

I had to run that load of laundry through two more times, finally adding as much bleach as I dared to kill the germs and odour without bleaching the clothes.  Even after that, I couldn’t be sure if the smell was gone. Did they really still smell or was the smell permanently etched to the inside of my nostrils? I didn’t know! I decided to throw them in the dryer but, AGAIN, not a scented dryer sheet to be found, only those damn reusable dryer balls. I had nothing to help offset any imaginary smells, not even essential oils. What kind of failed hippie am I? I finally wound up dousing a baby wipe with vanilla extract, threw it in and hoped for the best.

And that’s the story of how I wound up getting less than four hours sleep the day before back-to-school for yet another year. It wasn’t all bad, though. I did get to catch the tail end of a great Children’s Place sale and load up uniforms for this year. Free shipping and everything, yo.

The good news is that I woke up to a dryer full of very fresh and clean smelling clothes. There’s not a trace of mouse, bleach or vanilla. They’re just clean. Phew!

Oh, and I got these guys off to school to. That was pretty cool.