At nearly every turn, someone is giving you a choice. Every time someone gives you a choice, it’s like they’re doing you some great service. Politicians have made a political living campaigning on “choice.” I’m here to tell you that choice is not all it’s cracked up to be. That’s why, in this time of 3 a.m. feedings, I’ve engaged in a wardrobe simplification program. It works like this. You take the laundry cycle of your house (i.e. how often you do it) and select one t-shirt and undergarment for each day of the cycle. Then divide the cycle by two, round up to the nearest whole number, and select that number of shorts. By my calculations, you can get double the wear on a pair of shorts if you restrict your activities to the indoors. (Who wants to go outside and sweat twelve hours after a 3 a.m. feeding anyway?).

The rewards of this program are two fold. First, there’s very little need to trouble your muddled mind deciding what to wear. Our household has a three day laundry cycle, so I only have to choose between one pair of shorts and two t-shirts (I’ll be wearing one of the pairs of shorts one of the t-shirts at the time). Even I can handle that. Second, laundry time is greatly simplified. I just take the heap out of the dryer and toss it in a corner. The key is finding a corner where your wife doesn’t look.

One day, years from now, I’ll come across my Amicalola Falls t-shirt and wax sentimental. “That’s the shirt I wore after Adam was born.” You just can’t buy that kind of sentiment. It has to be nurtured over time – in this case, about three weeks.