My husband opened the door and pushed a basket, piled with week worth of laundry, inside the house and closed the door.
My kid stopped playing and looked at laundry basket and then at me and asked me curiously ‘are we playing laundry now?’
When I said yes , k jumped up in joy and pulled basket to middle of room, dumped everything on floor and jumped headfirst on to the pile , quite gleefully, and said ‘I am hiding’ and continued to giggle.
I let my kid play for 5-10 minutes and got up and got couple of hangers of both k and ours to start putting the clothes away.
K stopped hide and seek and ran to grab hangers saying ‘me , me’ and took couple of hangers , put them on the floor and held out a hanger for me to load a shirt.
I started to work in phases , putting clothes on hanger my kid held out and in parallel quickly folding others while my kid carefully placed the loaded hanger either on basket or on sofa
Since kid’s mind can turn to dumping mode anytime, I take frequent pauses to put away loaded hangers or folded clothes. That way if k starts dumping again the entire effort is not down the drain and I don’t have a reason to stress or cry about.
Sure, I can do the laundry when kid is asleep and SAVE lot of time, which, to be honest, I do from time to time when workload is mile high.
That would deprive my kid from ‘Playing the Laundry Game’ or enjoy transference schema (dumping and loading), developing fine motor skills (manipulating hangers), playing innovative games (hide-and-seek, throwing items inside basket, using basket as tent, bed, boat and so on), exercising maximum effort (pushing heavy basket) and finally doing a practical life activity – the actual laundry
And more importantly it would make me continue to treat these activities as ‘boring and time consuming work’ instead of treating them as an exciting activity through my kids eyes and continue to discover fun game out of every laundry session.
Thank you kid !!