Double take

I realize this blog entry is more for me than for anyone else, but I figured since blogs are just glorified diaries with an audience,however meagre (in my case), I'd allow myself this opportunity to vent--not that it'd be the first time, anyway.

This story involves laundry and my love/hate relationship with it.  Wait, did I say love/hate?  I meant hate/hate.  Like pretty much anything house- and parenting- related, laundry never stays done.  No matter how many loads of laundry you do, there is always clothing or linens that are in the process of becoming dirty.  And don't even get me started on children's clothes.  Not only do stains mysteriously appear seconds after I've just clothed one of my sons, but one load of children's laundry includes three times the amount of clothing of a load of other laundry, and I do at least three times as many loads of children's laundry.  So...does anyone have a calculator?...well, let's just say that equals a lot of laundry. 

Sometimes, in order to maximize the amount of laundry going in the wash, I will strip myself and anyone unfortunate enough to be in my direct vicinty down to the essentials and throw it all in, simply for the satisfaction that, for a brief flash of time, all of the laundry in the house will be clean.  For this reason, I take satisfaction in putting away clothes that my children have outgrown simply because it won't be getting dirty again (for the sake of today's argument, let's ignore the equally strong feelings of nostalgia and sadness that also accompany this task as I realize how quickly my boys are growing up). 

I have been collecting this outgrown clothing in bins in the boys' closets because Jakub's will be inherited by his brother, and Matěj's will, in turn, go to his cousin.  However, some of my bins have remained at my parents' house (who have dragged boys' clothing across two continents for four years now, some items more than once), and I had been accumulating Matěj's old clothing in a neat, though precariously leaning tower on the floor of his closet.  Well, I've been trying to keep if neat, because for some inexpicable reason, Jakub has decided to create a game called "How Many Times Can I Knock Over/Strew the Clothing All Over the Floor Before Mommy Has a Massive Stroke?"  I've only actually caught him in there once, but every few days I will open the closet doors to see that the clothing bandit has struck again.  So, I was grateful when my mom brought over a 40-gallon bin into which I could finally tuck the clothing away and be done with this whole rigmarole.  I spent a good thirty minutes carefully folding all of the little items of clothing, exhaling wistfully every now and again, for good measure, and heaved a huge sigh of relief when I snapped the lid shut.

 So you can imagine my confusion when I opened the closet door today to see this:

Such is the state of my mind these days that it took me a few seconds to register what I was seeing.  Worried I was going mad, I checked the bin:

Now, I know there was only one culprit that could have been capable of this enterprise and let me just say that Jakub was saved by two things: 1) he wasn't home at the moment of my discovery, and 2) the mental picture of him taking the clothes out of the bin and carefully placing them back into the closet was only slightly more endearing than it was infuriating.  But, seriously, I really wish I had been there to witness the execution of this task and to ask out why, on this green earth, he did it.