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I thought it would be fun to start a blog series on Pet Peeves.    I've tried to run this series with my husband in real life, but I've found that saying "Do you want to know a Pet Peeve of mine?" is just another way of saying "Do you want to get into a really big fight?".     It seems that a lot of Pet Peeves center around things that the people you live with in close quarters do and those people do not find commentary on them to be 'open discussion',  rather they react as if they were a call to arms,  often garnering a response of "Oh yeah? Well you want to know what some of MY Pet Peeves are?"  As it turns out, I usually don't.  So the blog is safer.

Today's subject is buttons.   As background, we have a live-in nanny, a grandmother of 15, who seems to delight washing our clothes at least twice a day.   I don't know where she finds all the dirty clothes to be running the washer so often; I can only imagine she takes them out of the dryer and runs them through the mud in the back yard to kick start her next load. 

For some reason, whenever she washes anything with buttons, including button down shirts, she buttons every single button before folding.   I then must unbutton every item before ironing (somehow the I-love-laundry routine ends at folding),  all the while feeling the same mounting frustration I do in a clothing store when I have a stack of shirts to try on and they all are fully buttoned. 

I'm sure buttons were great in the 1800's when times were slower and it would take three weeks to find out that a new President had been elected, but in today's world, they are too slow.     Have you ever stood around and buttoned a shirt without also looking for your shoes or peering into your kid's room to see if they straightened up?   It's almost impossible to just stand in one place and button until the job is done, because it takes so long.   So I hate it that she pre-buttons the shirts, thus doubling my buttoning work, and I tried to suggest she didn't need to do that anymore, but that has taken as well as the suggestion that she stop using the double rinse cycle.   Stubborn laundry habits die hard and one can take only so many risks towards having to do their own laundry.