My daughter has become quite a good cook over her sophomore year, and it is fun to send her recipes that are easy and I think that she will like.
I laughed about your comment about realizing that you were washing clean clothes. I have never asked, but wonder if my daughter is better at not leaving her tiny panties all twisted into her skinny jeans now that she usually does her own. I imagine that that she doesn’t take them off in one fell swoop now that she has to untwist things herself. LOL.
A big advantage of doing my college-aged kids’ laundry – the freshly cleaned money I always find in the dryer!
DS is back in the nest for a bit. There are three of us in the household. It is wasteful for DS to do his stuff separately. Three of his towels to one load and then six of ours to another- when the machine can handle 9+ at once is silly. Then again, my dirty (ha) little secret is I actually like doing laundry. T-shirts and bedding get hung in the sun to dry. If I’m in the mood so do socks and undies. My linen closet smells like ozone.
One of the little things I did - and continue to do - is their bedding. They’d bring home the stuff from college/apartment and I’d rehab it since their eco friendly machines do an awful job. Again, they head back with a bag of ‘sunshine’ in tow. Laundry is not the hill upon which I plan to do battle.
DS is out for a few weeks. I will strip the bed, wash and sun dry the linens and probably stick the mattress our for a day of sunshine too. He will return to that wonderful scent. It makes me happy. It probably also makes me weird.
Now…the feeding of the multitudes is a different matter. I HATE to cook. So, now it’s an assemble it yourself plan. Or, if you don’t want to make that effort then take your own $$ and take purchase what you want. Oh…and clean up the kitchen!
D2 is living with me now. She is going to be home for another year before she is off to the next phase of her life. I cook for her when I can and I do laundry for both of us. I kind of feel like this is the only time she will be pampered (to the extend I can), because for the rest of her life she will be taking care of others (husband, kids, me when I get older 
).
I told my son if he put my bras in the dryer one more time he could go to the store and try on new ones.
When we were in college, Mr R’s parents lived close so we would often go over on weekends to watch football games and use their washer & dryer.
Every once in a while his mom would start doing our laundry and it would weird me out. My own parents haven’t done my laundry (with exceptions of course if I was sick or slammed at work) since I was young so the idea of someone else touching my dirty laundry gave me the heebie jeebies. Totally a me problem and not a her problem.
When I would come home to work 20 hour weekends (which was often in fall and spring), my mom would help out by doing a load or two.
But I’d do the same for them. I went up to their house a few weeks ago and would switch a load or throw one in or whatever if I heard the washer go off.
I have zero idea how it would even come up whether or not my parents did my laundry… ever. Or when I started cooking for myself. Or any of that jazz really. My parents cut out judgmental people from their lives pretty quickly. It’s one of the reasons that we’re not close with much of our bio family.
I stopped doing my kids laundry when they entered middle school, about age 10. About the same time I stopped making full meals on the weekends and it became more of a free for all unless I was grilling in the summer or cooked a nice sit down on Sunday afternoon. But I always cooked a hot breakfast before they went to school and packed them a nutritious lunch right from preschool to high school. I also prepared dinner each school night while they did homework (D) or playing sports (S). Unfortunately now, although my S has turned into quite the cook, poor D can’t boil an egg.
With 5 kids, it was easier for me to do laundry all together. However, 10 years ago, when my commute more than doubled. I stopped doing laundry during the week and encouraged the kids to do their own. Around the same time, H moved his office to the house so he does laundry too. At this point, I wash my own laundry and will toss in towels or loose items to fill up the load. The boys do their own, although I have this feeling that oldest boy just buys new underwear every couple of months. Ironically, when I was single, I had SIXTY pairs of underwear and ten bras because the laundromat was 3 blocks away and I worked awful hours. Eventually, I began paying for dropoff service.
As for cooking, that has always been an H thing. I’m a good cook but he’s better AND he enjoys it, whereas to me it’s just a chore. The boys sometimes cook, though nothing really complicated.
Once my kids got into elementary school, I stopped making lunches for them. I went to yeshiva and lunch was provided and in HS, i was a free lunch kid, so I had no family history of making lunches. I also always say I am going to brown bag lunch but I never do. I am in court most days and schlepping lunch around just doesn’t appeal to me.
I have started making the kids responsible for their own appointments. I will call and say an appointment is needed but leave the kid’s number for the call back because I got tired of making an appointment and having my child say that’s not a good time for me.
Making lunches was always my least favorite chore. I hate it with a passion, and I literally danced with glee when my youngest child was accepted into a high school with a fabulous, pre-paid lunch program. I now take a bagged lunch every day, myself, because I work in Times Square and can’t deal with the crowds. However, my husband and I have negotiated a deal whereby I peel all of the potatoes in return for having him pack my lunch every day. I am quite pleased with the trade, and so is he.
DH always made lunch for the guys. He enjoyed it a lot.
S2 is living at home and does his own laundry – I won’t put his nasty smelly sports gear in with our stuff. He leaves it on the floor in front of the washer entirely too long, IMO.
S2 and DH do most of the cooking at our house. I do DH’s laundry but I don’t pick it up off the floor.
No one has mentioned how being a stay-at-home parent may have influenced this. I’ve been a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom for almost 20 years, so I do EVERYTHING, except when I don’t, and then no one does. My husband was raised by June Cleaver, and while he’d tell you he’s a modern man, his expectations are obvious. He earns all the money, so it seems fair enough.
Now, though, I have a teen and a young adult. My chores were supposed to benefit my little kids who couldn’t do the things, and my husband, and now they’re enabling my sexist boys, and making life miserable for future partners, and maybe even roommates. BUT I am NO June Cleaver. I suck at most all domestic duties besides parenting (minus the training in chores part).
So, laundry. I’m actually pretty darn good at it. And the tricky thing is, my kids are SO much busier than I am, I would look like a freeloader if I didn’t do the things I do, including all the laundry, washed, dried, folded. I no longer put it away. There’s progress.
I might be going back to work soon…largely to get out of the chores.
When our kids are home they just add our laundry to theirs and visa versa to fill the washer. Running small loads is not very efficient.
My daughter started making her own school lunch early on; I don’t remember what age. I made my son’s till he graduated. Neither ever bought a school lunch. My daughter insisted on doing her own laundry. Guess who didn’t. I didn’t actually want anybody else to use the washer and dryer because then they were unavailable when I wanted to use them. My son continues to need help with appointments and insurance and probably always will. To be fair he has way more appointments to make and keep track of than most people. I’m generally happy to provide whatever help that’s needed. By now it’s clear that the one made her way to independent adulthood despite or because of my parenting skills and the other is who he is despite or because of my parenting skills.
Same situation here. I like to pretend it’s not my fault that my son is a prince, but of course it is.
Our house has a laundry chute, so all the dirty laundry ends up in the same mountain. It’s easier to just do everybody’s wash than to sort it out by person. Both kids know how to do laundry, and will do a load if they need something washed before I get to it. Occasionally they’ll just wash a small load of their own things, ignoring the mountain of other stuff that needs washing; then I get annoyed.
Laundry was never a “line in the sand” issue, but my older kids started doing their own when I was having chemo when they were 9 and 12. I never took back the job and the youngest started doing her own at about 10 or 11.
I went back to full-time work when the older two were in college, and since I was making my lunch every night I started packing one for D2 as well. I got pretty creative and packed some fun stuff - she started asking for more food in her lunch…turned out her friends all wanted bites of her lunch!
I love washing clothes. But if you want them to look nice, you have to fold or iron them yourself. We’re on a septic system. It makes more sense to do a full load at a time, so we just wait until we have enough of a particular kind, then whoever is in the “laundry zone” does them.
I actually enjoy doing laundry and if I do any of the visiting kids’ laundry it is just my way of saying so happy you are here I love you. They do their laundry 51 other weeks out of the year. I make no apologies.
Mine gradually morphed into doing their own laundry, though any would throw in other color appropriate items in the basement pile. However, I always said post divorce that we gave up church on the every other weekend for laundry, as we would all fold together on Sunday mornings as they prepared for the week and the switching of houses. My chief goal in housework and house care was to make sure they knew how to pitch in on the task at hand, as no one should be sitting watching others work.
Regarding keeping a machine long term, my concern was to not overload and stress the machine, rather than minimize numbers of loads. Kids tend to overload, or at least mine did.
My husband is a runner and washers his running stuff every day. It drives me nuts, and seems wasteful. But I gave up complaining about it a long time ago. My H might also tell you he does half the laundry. But somehow I wind up with all the sheets, towels, etc. except the ones only he uses.