not well, really. not well at all. and laundry is the crowning jewel on my crown of thorns. the essence of my weakness. the perfection of my failure. but this is how we do it, or at least, how we try.
first of all, we have a family closet. we copied the idea from the duggars. (we have not copied having 4 washers and dryers, having 4 older daughters helping with laundry, or having our piano teacher help do laundry 2 full days a week. then again, we're not on tv, and that's ok-fine with us.) it is not for the parents, just the children. all the children. we converted a bedroom and put shelves up and down each 10+ foot tall wall.
the upper shelves, which even tall people need a step ladder to reach, contain a laundry basket for each size and gender, 0-6 month girl, 9-12 month boy, etc. then one wall has a large and a small basket for each child. the large basket has his/her pants and shorts - just what they wear, no shorts in winter, limited number of pants - and the small has jammies and unders (not socks, they live downstairs, near the shoes).
on the opposite wall are two long rows of hangers which contain all of the shirts we own, from size 2 through young adult (snap crotch shirts go in the baby's bucket). we don't separate the shirts out for weather (which explains why my children show up places in june with long sleeves and in january in a tank top).
when sizes are close, there is the potential of overlap. the kids tend to have shirts that are theirs, and don't normally wear each other's shirts, even when they could. they just don't like the same things. i have had a couple boys bicker over a shirt or two, and had to help the older one see the size, and that he was too big for it.
this system has eliminated much of the headache of changing sizes and seasons. much. but not all. i still have to take down the right basket and switch the shorts for the pants or size 4 for 5. sometimes a child will find their own next size basket (or the pants that were too small for big brother got put in little brother's bucket) and that basket will have all the size 4 and size 5 pants in it, until mom gets around to putting the too small size away, but it really is a pretty good system.
i also get in trouble when we receive a new bag of clothes that don't fit anyone immediately but i don't get around to putting them up, and then they get assimilated into the wrong size bucket (daughter number two wears size ten but has been pulling 14's from a new bag because i'm behind on laundry - you'd think this would inspire me to catch up)
the problem is just volume. and toddlers. small people inspired by aliens (we watched close encounters last night) who go into the family closet and just start ripping clothes off hangers, breaking and bending the hangers in the process. (it's an evil plot to send me to the asylum and hope for a nicer replacement mom.)
but no, i don't go insane. i delegate. i put someone in charge of cleaning the room. so every day, the person responsible for cleaning the family closet goes in, gets ALL the clothes, clean AND dirty, from all over the floor and put them in the dirty clothes. i start to get suspicious when i find shirts in the dirty laundry baskets that are still on the hangers, maybe this shirt hasn't been worn. not by a human anyway. only aliens wear clothes with hangers still in them.
then there's the problem when the dirty clothes basket from the family closet gets brought to the laundry room but isn't replaced with an empty one. you can guess what happens. someone's basket gets christened the new dirty clothes basket and begins to fill with everyone's cast-offs. now the 4-yr-old's basket has her clean clothes and everyone else's dirty ones.
and sometimes the 5 year old just takes his clothes off and flings them everywhere, some kind of freedom ritual, no doubt. and the 7-yr-old has discovered the value of privacy and has made the space behind the door his own private dressing room and hamper.
so the family closet is at one end of the long hall way. with all it's shortcomings, i still prefer it to having 10 dressers. at the other end of the long hallway is the laundry room. about two thirds of the way down is my door. and the space between my door and the laundry room is what we call the laundry hallway. there is a bathroom in that hallway that no one uses, partly because the door can only be opened about 10 inches before it hits the line of dirty clothes baskets, and partly because rumor has it there are spiders and "tivisees" (3-yr-old for weird , scary, centipede-looking things) in it. so everybody uses mom and dad's bathroom and only the truly brave or duty driven venture further down the laundry hallway.
the laundry hallway rarely (only after grandma visits, really) has fewer than 5 baskets of dirty clothes in cue. inside the laundry room/cave, there is usually at least a foot and a half of clean clothing waiting to be folded and sorted (a foot and a half deep, as wide as the floor). i am 6 foot 5 in the laundry room.
the system, when it is working properly, which would probably require a different mother, goes like this:
child A collects clothing from the two hampers and brings to the laundry room and starts a load in the morning.
child B comes up sometime during the day and switches the laundry load, folding and sorting all of the clothing into 1 of 3 places: parents pile, shirts (to be hung up by child C), and the 6 kid baskets.
[the kids' clothing baskets have different buddies, chosen specifically so that their stuff looks different from the person they're with: big girl with little girl, big boy with little boy, middle kid with downstairs laundry or dressup clothes.]
child C hangs up all the shirts in the laundry room.
in the evening before bed, mom does the final switch and sort and we're all caught up.
in the morning, everyone empties their buckets and hangs their shirts and life is beautiful.
but there are some hitches. as i said, one is volume. there are a lot of clothes. we receive a lot of clothes. we keep stuff we get when it is good (good = modest and not ripped up or stained) because we are hard on clothing. we go through the knees of most pants. we rip and stain shirts. we don't just put holes in socks, we disintegrate them. this seems to be the last stop clothing makes before it hits the dump. so we have a lot because we need a lot. even if a pair of pants happen to survive child #3, they will be worn again by children numbers 6, 7, and 9. the result of having a lot of clothing is that if we get behind, we get way behind.
another hitch is illness. particularly the kind of illness that makes for more laundry. there is a delightful young woman at our church who recently started coming over and picking up 3 baskets of dirty clothes on mondays and bringing back 3 baskets of clean clothes a day or two later, which is a huge blessing. but when we all got a horrible puking thing, we agreed that she would not do any more laundry till we had disinfected ourselves, for the sake of her one-year-old. i'm not caught up yet. it's like saying i won't get help for my algebra class until i get an A on a test. who am i kidding?
another thing that sets us back is road trips. as i said before, we take more stuff to soccer than many people take for a weekend away. many years, i haven't caught up from thanksgiving before it's time to pack for Christmas. and a big camping vacation . . . it could take weeks to recover.
finally, there is the laundry waste problem. do we really need to wash dress-up clothes after they are worn for an hour? do we have to get out a fresh washcloth for every spill? i have a couple people, one in particular, who will wear the same clothing until i require them (him!) to take them off, but i also have a little girl who changes clothing to go from one room to the next, and a little boy who, um, walks around with a wet circle on the front of his trousers. then there are the diaper people, who, between their less than tidy eating habits, the diaper factor, and the innate desire to shed and lose clothing when one is that age, change clothes a little more often than some.
socks. that's probably another blog. it's not good. that's all i'll say. it's not good.
so, that's how i do it. don't you feel better about yourself, now?
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