Love of game comes out in the wash

By Barbara Stavetski

It's football season, and we all know what that means - the clack of helmets in the crisp autumn air and the sound of the washing machine grinding away in the basement. Football produces more dirty laundry than politicians.

My son, Teddy, 11, has game pants and practice pants, practice jerseys and game jerseys, game socks, practice socks and lucky socks. He has T-shirts for under his pads. He has T-shirts for over his pads. His team practices three times a week. Then they have games on the weekends.

I'm running a 24-hour laundry service. I secretly think some laundry detergent company is in cahoots with the youth football league.

The worst thing is, the pants come with all these protective pads that you have to take out before you wash them. Then you have to try to put the pads back in. I'm always afraid I'll put the pads in wrong and be responsible for his broken kneecaps. (I can hear it now: "Yeah, my stupid mom put my kneecap protectors in backward.") Worse yet, sometimes a pad goes missing, and I have to pay my younger son, Timmy, 9, five bucks to track it down.

Who in their right mind ever decided that football pants should be white? It's not like they stay white. They were white for about 10 minutes after Teddy put them on the first time. Now, they're a grimy mix of green grass stains, coffee-colored mud splotches and some strange reddish streaks from what I think is Gatorade, but he claims is blood from an opposing player.

As if things weren't challenging enough, this year his game jersey came with special washing instructions: Wash separately. Do not dry in dryer.

Okeydokey. I'm doing twenty loads of laundry a week, but Teddy's game jersey gets a special cycle all to itself. And it has to air dry. Now we drive to the games with Teddy's still damp shirt hanging out the window.

At one practice, I dropped him off in the rain. It had been drizzling all day, and the field was one black, oozy pit of mud. I eyed it warily.

"Uh, try not to get too dirty," I told him.

"Yeah, no, problem, Mom," he said, climbing out of the car. "My coach will say, 'Teddy, how could you miss that tackle?' and I'll say, 'Oh, my mom told me not to get dirty.' "

"Teddy, I meant don't get overly dirty," I said. I was watching some kids from the younger age group who were sliding down the muddy hill on their knees, rolling in the mud and throwing the mud at each other.

"Don't do what those kids are doing," I warned him.

Teddy looked over at the kids and his eyes lit up.

"Don't even think about it," I told him as I drove off.

When he returned home two hours later, he was so filthy I almost couldn't recognize him.

My sister's boys play flag football. I used to think it was because she didn't want to risk them getting injured. Now I know it's because they have only one piece to their uniforms - a jersey. Washer and dryer compatible. And they wear it only once a week in the game. My sister is the smartest person I know.

Even better, my daughter is in the marching band. They keep their uniforms at school. We don't have to wash them or worry about losing them.

I love the marching band.