This is the mismatched shoe bin at our house right now. WHAT????!
(As I told my husband… “SOCKS are explainable. They get wedged behind dressers and slip under beds. But SHOES?????!”)
WHY do I have this many mismatched blue flip-flops and mismatched black dress shoes???! The struggle is real.
CLICK TO SEE A 30-second VIDEO of my laundry pile this morning: laundry
Category: Grow as Homemaker
Theodore’s Face!!! ROFL
🙂 pretty stinking cute huh?
We have 9 children and wash about 3 loads per day. We have 2 dirty hampers that we unload daily and my 8 and 10 yr old sort the clothes and make piles in our hallway. These piles remain there until taken downstairs to washing machine. Because they are already sorted out, even my younger children (7 yr old or 8) can carry a load down and put the soap in and wash a load. My oldest child’s “morning chore” is to was a load, but other than that, the loads are my responsibilty. BUT if anyone during the course of the day is not doing lessons, wasting time, etc., the usual consequence is to go wash a load, or bring one up from dryer, etc. And this may be really terrible, but we do NOT fold most of our clothes. I know…gasp! Most of our clothes are “play clothes” and are not worn in public. When a load comes up from the dryer, it is announced what type of load it is: girl load, boy load (we wash them separately). Whatever load it is, the responsible party comes and retrieves their individual clothes and takes them to their rooms to put in their bins/dressers. This saves me TONS of time and honestly, I can’t see a difference in folded clothes and unfolded when worn. If they are church clothes I could see it, but not clothes that are worn just to sit and do lessons and then play in later. Church loads are speedily put away when they are brought up. We often yell so everyone knows that such a load has been brought to living room. Again, everyone grabs their clothes and hangs up the articles in their closets. This also saves time as I do not need to iron most things because a “church load” is automatically hung up. Of course my littles ones can’t hang their clothes up so I will do that (or whoever is taking care of the load at that particular time) but most of even their church clothes don’t need to be hung up. I neatly fold them and place them on a shelf specificallly for all of the younger children’s nicer clothes. This keeps them from being tossed in with their other clothes. My 2 and 4 year old can even get their clothes from the couch, take them to their room and put them away. Easy. And no more laundry piles except on Monday…since we don’t wash on Suday (except for a towel load, maybe). In two days’ time, it’s amazing the clothes that can pile up. This method works for us and saves our living area from being bombarded with clothes. Of course, the children are more than welcome to fold all of their clothes and some do, but most do not. Thanks for your blog. I enjoy reading.
Interesting. We don’t fold undies or socks. But I prefer for everything else to be folded, and I can see a difference with the amount of wrinkles in certain things– especially t-shirts, cotton fabrics, jeans, and khakis.
I don’t iron, AT ALL, though, unless it’s a super-special event (maybe 1-2 times a year, at most?), like, my child is actually IN a wedding or something. 🙂
So glad to hear this!! We have 6 kids, and I don’t fold any kids’ clothes. I usually do 4 or 5 loads in one day pulling out Dad’s work clothes and my shirts so they don’t get wrinkled, then the next I bring all the loads upstairs and dump them on the living room floor. Then all the kids help sort (ie throw) clothes into piles by who they belong to. If that child wants to fold his or her clothes they are welcome to once all the laundry is sorted and towels are folded and put away (which is the kids’ job). The closets in their rooms are just shelves and they each have 4 ‘buckets’ for pants, shirts, pjs & socks/undies. They just toss the correct clothing in the bucket and they’re done. I haven’t noticed that their clothes aren’t folded and usually around age 6 they start folding on their own anyways. I was always getting frustrated I spent all this time folding their clothes then they just dump out the drawer or bucket to find something and it was all a waste. When I quit folding it was SO freeing! I honestly can’t remember the last time I ironed something!
Jess, I’ve got a similarly huge pile of folding to get to! Mine’s piled on the long counter in my laundry room. 🙂 Dh used to tease me about putting a couch in the laundry room at our old house, because there was nowhere to fold in there so I always piled it all on the couch!