It dawns on me three loads in that nowhere in the jumble of Daddy’s t-shirts and sister’s skirts, and oodles of onesies and shorts, have I seen a single pair of underwear for my oldest son.  Granted, we all know about boys and their underwear, how getting them to shed that layer on a daily basis is like skinning a cat, but the absence of ANY underwear in all that wash, got me wondering. 

I made my way from the laundry room to the check the bathroom drawer which was empty save for a pair of too-small Thomas the Train “tighty-whities” shoved in the back.  Growing curiouser by the minute, I checked the pj and sock drawer in his room, and the swimwear and sheets drawer too, only to come up emtpy-handed. 

Bemused and confused, I marched out to the living room where my son lay sprawled on the couch, his legs flailing in the air like an up-side-down beetle.  “Solomon,” I asked in a voice filled with incredulity, “where are all of your underwear?”

“I don’t know,” he says, unconcerned and more than a little delighted. 

This is how it’s been, you see, ever since we put the house up for sale and I cleverly hid all sorts of things in all sorts of places.  I can’t find my t-shirts and John and I both swear up and down that there must be a whole basket of missing laundry SOMEWHERE. 

As we prepare to move into temporary housing in the next couple of weeks, still waiting for the right house to come onto the market, I can only imagine it getting worse.  Who knows what will go missing next? 

“Oh, well,” I think to myself, as we settle in to watch TV after a long night of house-hunting followed by more frantic apartment-hunting, “I guess we’re going to just ‘free-ball’ it,” and I immediately smile at the thought which so aptly describes our situation in both the literal and the figurative sense.

This post is linked with Five Minute Friday on the topic “In-Between.”