Always Check the Pockets

In the nine years that I have been washing my son's laundry I have pulled many things out of his pockets.

There was the time that he raided our penny jar and filled every pocket up with a handful of pennies. It may not sound like a lot, but have you seen the amount of pockets that boys pants can wield these days?

Then there was the time that he was collecting bottle caps. Any bottle caps. Since our shopping list doesn't always contain items that have bottle caps that meant he would find them on the ground at the park, or worse, out of a disgusting garbage can. I shouted with great delight when he finally outgrew the bottle cap phase. He then went directly to rocks.

When he was a baby I used to have to shut the laundry room door because all those little snaps on his onesies and baby pajamas would clack and make a fairly large racket. Who knew that this was to prepare me for the day when there would be a two pound boulder that would sound like a large man with a baseball bat had gotten caught in the dryer.

Then he started school.

Crayons. Crayons became the bane of my life. Why? Because crayons in the dryer are an ugly, ugly thing. We had two incidences when this happened. We call them the Orange Incident and the Blue Incident. This is when I learned that no amount of pleading, begging or shouting was going to convince him to empty his own pockets. For my son, there are simply other things to think about. He just doesn't think to himself: "Oh! I better remove that orange crayon I stuffed in my pocket today because it might ruin my mom's brand new Anne Taylor jeans." But I am not bitter or anything.
This was the day when I got smart! And realized that his laundry must always be done separately.

From tissues to candy to empty bullet shells.

From sticks to wrappers to those awful stick-to-the-wall plastic lizards.

When it came out of my sweet boys' pockets I thought I had seen it all.

I was proven wrong this week when I pulled out a fork.

Yes, the fork pictured above.

It isn't my fork. My forks are packed up and are in storage somewhere.

It isn't my mothers fork.

So I asked him. Where in the world did you get that fork?

He looked at me with excitement in his eyes and said that he had been walking around the playground at school and had found it out on the field.

And, of course, put it in his pocket.

Tell me. What have you found in your child's laundry?