The Adventure of the Crawling Shirt

My son is diagnosed with OCD. Not the OCD your overly type-A friend proudly proclaims to have when she hands you a white glove and dares you to find dirt in her perfectly coiffed museum worthy surgically sterile home.

No, this is the FOR REAL OCD. The type that causes you to wash your hands sixty times every single instance you open your door and only after you have alternated locking and unlocking said door sixteen times in flawless repetition.

My son, whom I love more than myself, has an incredible desire to wear the same outfit, everyday, all the time. It used to toss between three shirts and two pairs of jean shorts which was manageable between laundry loads but constant wear caused one shirt to bear holes in the elbows and the other just got too small for him to keep on wearing. Of course, the eighties are back in style, so I could technically allow my son to wear an overly tight midriff even though it isn't net and he MIGHT get away with it.

...NAH...

Well, he has a Wall-E shirt that was given to him by his cousin. This is the last shirt standing. Everyday he wears this thing...even to bed! It has stains all over it and I try, boy do I ever, to get him to take it off even for just an hour so I can wash it but he has perfected the art of not acknowledging my existence during times such as these.

Today is a new day. Today I took him to the store and bought him a Bumblebee costume for his cousins birthday party. This little boy was so elated you couldn't get him to take that Wall-E shirt off fast enough.

Now, he is running around in his Bumblebee outfit and I am left with the task of washing the Wall-E shirt in a much needed bath. This shirt was so dirty I watched it crawl pitifully to my washer, open the lid and tumble right inside. Puffs of dirt escaped the neck collar as it loudly proclaimed for me to close the lid and add the soap, "Do it Now for the Love off all things clean and holy!"

So, I listened to the exhausted pleas of a dying dirty shirt. The Bumblebee costume has no idea what it has gotten itself into.