I’ve had a lot of clothes washing mishaps, but this one takes the cake.

It was 6:30 this morning, the house was dark, the boys still sleeping. I was all ready for work and decided to change the laundry before waking up the house. I had thrown a load of the boys’ clothes in last night but forgot to put it in the dryer.

I didn’t turn on the light in the laundry room, but light from the adjacent room was shining in. As I put the clothes into the dryer, I thought I felt a drop of water on my foot. I thought maybe the washing machine didn’t finish the spin cycle. The clothes felt suitably wrung out and there was no standing water in the washing machine. Hmmph. I continued putting the clothes in the dryer.

About halfway through, I realized that it was not water that had dripped onto my foot, there was white stuff all over the clothes. I thought maybe a tissue had been left in a pocket. I felt the stuff, it definitely wasn’t tissue. It was like snow; like a weird gel-like snow.

I was stumped. I could not conceive of anything that would have made this mess in the washing machine. I thought maybe the kids had a glow stick or something in their pocket but I couldn’t remember them playing with glow sticks recently.

I continued to put the clothes into the dryer. As I got to the bottom of the load, I had to shake out the clothes to remove the gel snow. There was a lot of it, way too much to have come from a glow stick.

I was stumped again until I reached into the bottom of the washer and pulled out a disposable diaper.

I have no idea how a disposable diaper found its way into the dirty laundry or how I didn’t notice it when I was putting the clothes into the washing machine. But when I consider the fact that for the last five and a half years, I have had at least one kid in diapers, I’m kind of surprised that it hasn’t happened before.