I baby gate off the laundry room.

Initially this started out as a way to keep Wee Payne from shoveling in mouthfuls of kibble whenever I was distracted. By the way, dog food dissolves pretty much on contact with baby spit, so there's no getting it back out.

Then I realized it was great for confining the dogs to a tiled area on rainy days when we were out of the house (Ethel is a bit of a princess and won't do her business outside when it rains). Incidentally, we ended up replacing the original wooden gate with a metal one, because Psycho When Confined Ethel scratched and chewed her way partially through the wooden one.

Then the laundry room sort of morphed into my happy place. I have a weird fixation with laundry. I like how warm the clothes are coming out of the dryer, I like how good they smell, and I like the mindless repetition of hanging, folding, sorting.... I just like doing laundry. So, whenever I'm getting stuff out of the dryer I close the baby gate behind me and have a few zen moments.

Sometimes Payne is ok with me doing this, sometimes not so much.

Today was a "not so much" day:


We had just built a Duplo Kitty and Puppy traveling cage (it was ingenius!) and he ripped it apart bit by bit and threw it at me. And really, I was so absorbed in my scented fabric based meditation that I didn't even notice what he was doing until I turned around to leave!