Lifes Laundry

Oh how I wish I had my Mothers old mangle.

I remember it moving with us from one Military house to another when I was a girl.  In the cellar in Rheindahlen, my sister and I used to put everything we could find through that thing.  Clothes, dolls, sandwiches...the lots...and yep, it all came out flat as a pancake!  It was soo very hard to turn the heavy metal handle and strangely, so much fun.  Weird kids we were.

Another bizarre memory that's just come to mind...  In that same cellar, with the steep concrete steps that led down to the dark depths of the earth (so it seemed), my Dad used to practice his pistol shooting.  So whenever Kate and I wanted to reach our playroom, (at the very end of the looooong dark concrete corridor), we had to shout down the steps to make sure that he wasn't standing at the other end of the passage way, pointing his gun at the target, which was positioned where our heads would appear as we got to the bottom.  Pretty scary when you think that he was almost always probably wearing great big sound-proof headphones, and would have no idea of our 'calling to see if he was there' or our footsteps on the stairway.  I do have a vague memory of my Mother shouting from the kitchen on occasion to remind us that he was getting in some shooting practice - it must have been enough times to teach us to be cautious - since happily, neither one of us has a hole in our heads.

But back to the mangle - this is why I wanted it today.

Take one laundry bucket full of dolls clothes...

Two enthusiastic little scrubbers....

A lot of soapy bubbles...

And a wooden clothes horse...

It's a recipe for success, as any housewife would tell you! ;)

And start em young I say...

Just don't forget to remove clothing first, before your child turns into one big soggy mess...

That Auntie Ginny is a bit of a minx, I think!

Not since my Mother regularly got my sister and I to wash by hand, have I seen a bunch of girls get so excited about laundry...

 
The irony is killing me, this is the most fun that they had all day..hehee.  I wonder what they will think 20yrs down the line....

And I'll let you in on a little secret....I'm still obsessed with laundry powder.  Sad really, and something else that I blame my Mother for, that and the fact that I still love the smell of freshly fired pistol caps - although maybe that's one for my Dad.