I may have shifted to an alternate universe

Reality as I knew it has shattered.

These thirty one years I've held with the notion that one can't have too many pairs of socks and underwear.  I've certainly believed in such a thing as having enough.  This is what has kept me from becoming a compulsive buyer of underpinnings.  Too many though? That's something I always viewed as unachievable.

I recently bought organizing boxes for the collective underwear drawers of my offspring.  Underwear drawers are the bane of my clothing storage organization.  I fold and stack and arrange but after one batch of clean laundry my work is undone.  I bought these boxes at Ikea.  The underwear drawers of all underwear wearing children are now subdivided to keep underpants apart from socks and socks out of the way of jammies etc.  I hope against hope that the problem has been solved.

As I addressed the bureaus of my girls I had to adjust the size of box needed for each category again and again.  The sock and underwear piles grew and grew.  I found panties in Moo's drawer that I haven't seen in months.  And socks?  Dear me the socks! The frequency with which my girls wear socks contrasted against my laundry rotation will tell you that each girl needs approximately one pair.  That number will certainly rise as temperatures (eventually) drop and they start wearing shoes apart from flip flops and jellies but for the time being one pair would more that suffice.  Ziz is required to wear closed toe shoes for school but she goes sockless in slip-on flats.

As I pulled pair after pair of socks from those drawers my view of the world shimmered at the edges.  "It can't be," I told myself. "There's no such thing as too many socks.  Everybody knows that.." but the walls of my reality shook, cracked and sparked until they fell and I was left sitting on the floor next to moo's bed with a lapfull of socks facing a new world.  A world in which my girls have way too many socks.  Even when winter does come and they wear socks everyday (Who am I kidding, they'll never wear socks everyday.  Not even in January) the top layer of their sock pile will be laundered and back in the drawer before they ever come close to reaching the bottom.

Too many socks.

I never would have guessed.

I did Enzo's drawer last.  He's got quite a plentiful supply of underpants.  This is largely owing to the fact that every pair he's ever owned since the dawn of his underwearing is still in his drawer.  The elastic has started to leave marks around his middle but he insists that they're still the right size and wears them without complaint.  On the sock front he's sitting comfortably at the plenty mark.  He actually wears socks to school everyday and every pair is in regular rotation. Still, we haven't had any incidences of no clean socks to put on. It's a perfect balance.

 I'm glad I finished with him.  Imagine if I'd started in his room and then was left at the end of the job with the disillusionment I found in the girls' sock drawers?