Too Long?

Has it been too long since I have ironed any clothes when I pull out the ironing board and Natalie asks, bewildered, "What is that?!"

And then I pull out the iron and she giggles like I've just produced an ancient torture device (what a minute...I think I have..) and demands, "And what is THAT!?!"

To be fair, if I ever ironed it was usually when the kids were asleep because I didn't want to deal with the whole issue of child pulling on the cord or me being clumsy and someone ending up with an iron on their head (which did come close to happening when Liam was very little). But to be even more fair, the near-miss incident was probably when Jim was ironing, because he is the only one who ever really irons around here. Now I just take his dress shirts to the drycleaner, and everything else we wear wrinkled. I have absolutely no issues with wearing clothes that look like they have been wadded up for weeks in a laundry basket without being folded. No qualms whatsoever.

In fact, the only reason I was ironing this time is because I was taking clothes to the resell shop. Yes, I will iron clothes for other people to buy them, but I won't iron them for my family to wear. With a few of Natalie's dresses it even occurred to me how nice they looked after being ironed. Hmm. Guess that would have looked good on her. Oh well. Of course, it did make me doubly frustrated when the resell shop only took 1/3 of the clothes. I was digging through their rejects to see if anyone of them were ironed, meaning I wasted precious minutes ironing - how awful would that be.

I've been in the mood to purge this year, and have also been listing things on Craigs List quite successfully. I'm starting to get addicted to that feeling. Getting rid of clutter AND making some money. Woo-hoo. The only downside is that this inadvertently introduced JIM to Craigs List. Silly me, when he asked me how it worked, I thought maybe he had some things to sell too. No, turns out he wanted to look up baseball bats for Liam. So now for every $ I make selling something, I have to worry that Jim is in the next room buying things. The man was born to run a sports equipment resell shop. He just loves all sports equipment, whether we need it or not. I told him I was OK with it as long as 1) he gets a good deal, and 2) the net/net of Craigs List is that we make money not spend it.