What is Wrong with my Flat Sheets?

So I may be new to this blogging thing, but I'm pretty sure that the way to attract hordes of followers to your site is not to write a post about laundry. But what can I say, I have been doing laundry all day. And when I say, "all day," I  mean ALL DAY. I started around 10 a.m.. I just finished. It is 10 p.m. To be fair, it is my own damn fault, which should be obvious to anyone who's ever done laundry. You know what it takes to accumulate 12 hours worth of laundry? Weeks of not doing laundry. Weeks and weeks. In my case, weeks and weeks and weeks. The only laundry I've done in recent memory has been preceded by the following statement from my husband, "Honey. I know you're really busy, but I have, like, no underwear left." What I want to tell him is that the washing machine does work when a man pushes the "start" button. But then I remember the fact that he does all of the cooking in our house, so the least I could do is an occasional load of laundry so that he doesn't have to go commando to work. Yeah, I suck.

So that's what I've been doing for the last several weeks; waiting until someone in the house completely runs out of clothing or underwear and then I do an emergency load - just enough to get us through the next 24 hours/crisis period. Which brings us to today, where my laundry situation makes The Next Martha's sock pond look quaint. At least her kids have clean socks. If my kids want clean socks, they need to give me at least threes hour notice. (BTW, if you don't know about The Next Martha, you can check her out on Twitter @TheNextMartha or on her blog: The Martha Project.)

Anyway, so my laundry room contained a small mountain of laundry that was finally tackled through hours of ceaseless attack. Beyond unwashed clothes, there were other obstacles that I also beat down. There was the mountain of clean clothes on the folding table that had accumulated whenever I previously washed and dried a load, but didn't bother folding it. There was the bin that I keep in the laundry room for kids' clothes that have gotten too small, that was overflowing to the point that it looked like the clothing version of Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout.

But it all got done. All of it. All our clothes are clean, dry, folded, and put away. (Well, except for a couple stragglers that go in the kids' rooms and they're currently sleeping.) All the outgrown clothes have been folded and sorted and packed into bins to be saved for the baby, saved for my sister's baby, or be sold/passed on to someone else's baby. I even did two sets of sheets! Folded. Put away. Really.

Which brings me to my greatest annoyance of the day: my flat sheets. Yes, that's right, the flat ones. Fitted ones and I get along pretty well. I'm no Martha Stewart, but they come out looking pretty darn good. See...

Not bad, huh? So here's what so damn annoying. I have conquered the fitted sheet. I can stick that lovely little package in my armoire and be proud. So then why the hell does my flat sheet give me such trouble? Here's what I mean. Every one of my flat sheets has edges that look like this:

It's a creased up mess.What's with that? And how do I stop it?

A couple months ago I got the bright idea that maybe if I ironed them once a year it would help. So I actually hauled out my ironing board and ironed those babies. Yes, I ironed my sheets. Who does that? But those damn creases were making me nuts. And it worked, too. For exactly one week until I washed them again. Then those stupid creases came right back again. And I tell you, folks, I am not about to start ironing my sheets on a weekly basis. (I don't know if you were paying attention up above, but I've barely been washing my sheets, much less ironing them.)

So I put them away, without a clue as to how to resolve my crazy crease problem. My two clean sets of sheets neatly tucked away in my armoire. One tiny corner of my house, actually clean. Who knows when I will next see two sets of sheets folded and put away again? Could be months.

I found out moments later that while I was folding sheets, my four year old was busy downstairs sprinkling breadcrumbs on the kitchen floor. So there's that.