Doing Laundry: Sock Serendipity

Sunday, 01. February 2009 by Melanie Ellison

One of my favorite things to do as a very little girl was laundry.  I loved to fold socks with mom, because she made it into a fun game.  We would lay all of the socks out one by one on the couch or bed and then go sock-shopping together (that was part of why I liked this so much - I had mom’s undivided attention in a fun game with her)!  I’d pick up one sock, and then mom would say in a pretend tone of voice, “Ma’am, do you happen to have a match for this sock?  I’d like to buy it from you, but I happen to need two that look alike today.”  And then we would go down the row, comparing the sock in hand with each of the others until we found just the one.  Then we decided to buy the pair for whoever it belonged to, and put it in our imaginary cart.  We would repeat the process and entertaining dialog until all the socks were done, and then I would be the delivery girl and bring each pile to the room where it belonged!

To this day I still find myself subconsciously going through the little game in my head with fond memories of the old bonding game with mom, and it makes an otherwise uninteresting job delightful!
My mother is now a nation-wide speaker at homeschooling conventions, and she has written (among 100 others) an article called The Power of a Focused Mother.

~Melanie Ellison, age 18, is an only child of Todd & Renee Ellison (with more children in heaven that they are looking forward to meeting).  She works hard at being a concert cellist (you can look her up on YouTube), loves to read (one of her favorite books for adolescent daughters is Beautiful Girlhood, by Mabel Hale in 1922), and enjoys little children.