Why I Don't Do Laundry During Naptime

And when it gets done instead

Anyone else out there like me on the weekends trying to make it to nap time? And then, after naptime is over–how many more hours to bedtime? 

I’m not even going to start with hedging about how I love my kids and don’t take this the wrong way. It goes without saying–I love my kids. I also really, really, love that they still nap. 

The midday break on the weekends is a must for my mental wellbeing, and when the naps eventually get dropped, I intend to replace them with a quiet hour—we’ll see how that turns out. 

When my first was still little, however, I did not fully maximize naptime. I used to wait till naptime in order to pivot from taking care of my kids to taking care of the house. Naptime was when I caught up on folding the laundry, or chopping up the vegetables and getting the spices out for dinner, or emptying the dishwasher. And I didn’t realize how much that was exhausting me. By the time my daughter would wake up, I would be going into her room no less tired than I was before her nap–and she was bright-eyed, rested, and ready for my energy again. 

It wasn’t fair to her, and it wasn’t fair to me. 

So somewhere along the way, I started to realize how better to use naptime by asking myself this: What is the something I can’t do while the kids are awake? 

• A long, hot shower? 

• A nap for myself? 

• Uninterrupted time to read a book? To write? To sit outside and enjoy a cup of chai that stays hot the whole time (this is before I got an Ember mug)? I think there were a couple naptimes I even watched a whole movie. 

It was a revolution in parenting for me. My husband often works on the weekends, and I would be solo with my little–at the time just one. I realized naptime was a way for both of us to get the rest we needed–from each other, and from the rest of the demands on us and our time. And I started walking into her room and getting her out of her crib with much more eagerness once I started filling up my own cup. 

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So what happened to the laundry? Didn’t it just start piling up, and wasn’t that worse for my mental health? Or did it just get punted to someone else? 

No, actually. It just got folded into the day while my daughter was awake. I can fold laundry while my daughter’s awake. And in fact, as she got older, some days she would get involved in it herself. She would match the socks and sort the cleaning rags, stacking them neatly on top of each other.

Sure, it made the task slower, but what’s wrong with that? To her, laundry was almost an activity. 

I think it’s become a good thing for my children to see me and my husband doing the necessary home tasks while they’re awake. I think it starts them young in their awareness of what it takes to run a household, and my daughter, who is now three, still keeps an interest–getting onto her kitchen tower to help me add spices to the dish I’m making, or helping me empty the dishwasher by taking out the spoons and forks from the reachable rack of the dishwasher.

At one, my son is more proficient in pulling out the lids from the cabinet than in putting them away, but eventually, I expect he too will learn that Mom is not the magician who made his clean clothes reappear in the drawer while he was napping, but rather that laundry is a visible, and tedious, and never-ending task—one that belongs to everybody.