Psychotomy

In India, we were having to wash clothes by hand. Either Kiir or I would take a few items into our “bath” with us and wash them, hanging them up when we finished. The soap was sometimes hard to clear from the clothes, and since the water is from a reservoir my uncle filled every morning when city water pressure was enough to be able to pump it, we tried not to use too much.

So some things didn’t get quite 100% clean. We threw everything from the trip through the laundry when we got home. And DK isn’t the cleanliest of chaps, even at home with carpets and hardwood flooring and cleanly rural life. On hard stone flooring, open doors, and smoggy dusty dirty cities? His clothes got horrible. So they needed a couple cycles through the laundry :o

But some clothes? Needed it more. For instance, here’s his shirt from the flight home. Delhi to NYC, 15 hours, and not a damned thing to do on the flight. So he watched iPod with his Tigger & Pooh episodes, and he ate lollipops. Lots of lollipops.

The flight home was not kind

That’s how the shirt looked when we got to JFK, so once we had time to sit down with our bags etc and take him off my back (he was in the carrier for wandering through baggage and check in and security and such), we popped off hte shirt and gave him a fresh one.

Without the Flash, it's worse

When I didn’t use the flash, the color is flawed, but the effect is a little more pronounced. That entire neckline and parts of the sleeves? They’re actually ENCASED in sugar from all those lollipops.

But that was from the flight, and was generally expected. I mean, 15 hours on a plane? Lollipops? Of course he’s gonna get messy. The one that kindof threw us was this one:

The original 'Great White Shirt'

This shirt was from the first week. We visited a couple relatives on the way to another where we were gonna spend a night or two. There wasn’t a lot of running around in fields or climbing through ruins or anything. It was just general daily usage!

When we left in the morning, we were talking about his Great White Shark shirt. By the time we peeled it off him in the evening we had re-dubbed it the Great White Shirt. As the trip progressed, the term generalized to reference any previously white shirt. Because none of them made it back to “white” while we were there. But the Great White Shirt we never even bothered trying to clean while we were there. Because we figured the amount of work it needed required someone who did the hand-washing regularly and knew how to get dirt and stains out. We didn’t really.

But once we got home, we threw all his clothes in the laundry with some detergent and some Oxy and let them soak overnight. Then ran them in the morning. Then ran them again because all the white shirts were still stain-y.

Germs without germs

The germ shirt came out OK at that point, but a couple others were a little worse off still. But I pulled them out and sprayed them with oxy pre-treater and set them aside while I threw the rest of DK’s clothes into the dryer. Then I spent the day washing diapers (another story)

After spraying occasionally through the day I finally tossed the last of the great white shirts, including The Great White Shirt in during the last cycle of pre-wash and left them in for diapernight. This morning I checked them after drying, and LO AND BEHOLD!

The Great White Shirt Is White

And OMG. thats a LOT of washing! :o

Posted in: DK, India by attriel /