The Crayon in the Wash and Other Small Catastrophes

Someone on Reddit posted a photo this week of baby clothes that had gone through the wash and dryer with a brown crayon still in the pocket. The result looked, depending on who you asked, like toasted marshmallows, prehistoric fossils, shrimp chips, or a litter of newborn puppies. One person on shrooms saw puppies. I believed them.

The actual question, “how do I fix this,” got buried fast under a genuinely brilliant pile-on of advice. Dawn soap. Oxiclean gel sticks. Melting the wax out with hot water and a rock dropped in each sock to weigh it down. Isopropyl alcohol from a spray bottle, “with caution.” Someone linked a crochet pattern for replacement booties. Someone else suggested keeping the ruined socks as campfire starters. It was, genuinely, one of the more satisfying threads I’ve read in a while, and I don’t say that about much on the internet these days.

What got me thinking, though, wasn’t the crayon. It was the argument buried underneath it, the one about whether it’s worth saving the socks at all.

One camp: the baby will outgrow these in six weeks, don’t waste your Saturday scrubbing wax out of size-0000 booties, buy new ones, move on with your life. The other camp: some of these were handmade, possibly by a grandmother, possibly with love, and you don’t throw sentiment in the bin just because the maths says it’s not worth the labour. Someone actually got a bit sharp about it. “Have you no heart, someone special could have crocheted those.”

Both sides are right, and that’s the bit I liked. There’s no correct answer to how much effort a small, disposable object deserves. My wife kept a single pair of newborn socks from our daughter for about fifteen years, in a drawer, for no reason either of us could fully explain. They didn’t do anything. They just sat there being evidence that a very small person once existed inside them. Meanwhile I’ve thrown out entire garbage bags of onesies without a second thought. Same category of object, wildly different treatment, and I don’t think I could tell you why in advance which one gets which fate.

That’s parenting in miniature, really. You’re constantly triaging, deciding on the fly what deserves your limited hours and what doesn’t, and you get it wrong in both directions regularly. You’ll spend forty minutes trying to fix a toy that cost four dollars, then absent-mindedly bin something that turns out to have mattered.

The internet, to its credit, didn’t try to resolve the tension. It just handed over every possible tool and let the original poster decide. Hot water and a rock. Dish soap and patience. Or a bin bag and a trip to Best & Less. All valid. Nobody moralised about it, which I appreciated, because there’s enough moralising about parenting choices online without adding “how invested are you in a pair of crocheted booties” to the pile.

I don’t have a tidy point to land on here. Some things are worth saving because they’re sentimental, and sentiment isn’t measured in hours worked. Some things are just socks. The trick, I think, is not being too proud to admit which one you’re dealing with before you’ve spent three hours melting wax over a stove for nothing.