I've already told you how we cleaned out our closets last month because my kids own too many clothes. I was hoping that a reduced wardrobe might help my kids' rooms stay cleaner and cut down on the amount of laundry I have to wash each week.
I was wrong.
So very, very wrong.
I did four loads of laundry this week for two little boys. A total of nearly twenty outfits each during a seven day period! How is this possible when I know that for three days this week these two little boys wore the same outfit every day, day and night?! I washed six pairs of church pants this week! That's three pairs each. I can assure you we did not attend church three times this week. We barely made it once, and if I remember correctly one of my boys was wearing shorts. I'm no Einstein, but I think the laws of time/space do not allow for wearing twenty outfits in a seven day period when you only change your clothes once every three days. So where do all these clothes come from and why are they in the laundry?
????????
You know the answer as well as I do. It is every mother's worst nightmare. I can barely stand to say it out loud.
They have been putting CLEAN clothes into the DIRTY laundry, and like an idiot, I've been rewashing it!
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One look in my boys' room confirmed what I already knew.
Clean clothes hanging out of the dresser.
More clean clothes piled on the floor in the closet.
I have suspected this was happening all along, but just didn't want to face it. But it's time. I'm ready.
"Hi, my name is Marcia, and I repeatedly rewash clean clothes. It's been three hours since my last load."
As I sat in the middle of my boys' room pondering how I might overcome this crisis, I had an epiphany.
OUTFIT BUNDLES!
Outfit bundles are a wonderful little thing I invented to solve a different problem many years ago. Toddlers like to pick out their own clothes. Being the relaxed and cool (some say lazy) mom that I am, I always try to let my kids pick out their own clothes. My oldest loved to pick out her own clothes. Unfortunately the outfits she chose were often a little bit special. Little girls' clothes can be especially difficult to match. They have so many prints and colors, it can be nearly impossible for a three year old to master. I mean why shouldn't a shirt that has flowers on it, automatically match any pair of pants with flowers on them too? In an effort to allow my daughter to continue choosing her own clothes while preserving my eyesight against her wayward choices, I invented Outfit Bundles.
An outfit bundle is just what it sounds like: an entire outfit wrapped up in a cute little bundle. When I fold it up, I tuck the pant legs into the waist band and the hold thing stays together quite nicely.
When my three daughters were tiny, they shared a little, plastic, three drawer dresser. They each had a drawer filled with pre-matched outfit bundles. When they woke up in the morning, they could each pick out one bundle and get dressed all on their own. No messy drawer full of pants to dig through. No pulling out all the shirts in the drawer just to find the one they wanted. They felt big and in control, and I felt awesome for having avoided a power struggle.
I have never used outfit bundles for my boys because boys' clothes are so much easier to match. Nearly all their pants are solid, neutral colors, so they can be matched with almost any of their shirts. Clashing and mismatching are just not a big problem. But it occurred to me that outfit bundles may help me to gain some control over my boys' laundry problem. So I set to work.
First I took all their clothes and piled them in one place. This was a mistake. It was overwhelming.
So I collapsed in the pile of laundry and cried.
At this point, I could hear my mother's voice in the back of my mind saying, "If you spent as much time folding your laundry as you do taking pictures of it......" So I ate a pudding cup and got back to work.
I made seven outfit bundles for each of my boys, plus one bundle of Sunday clothes each. I found two little baskets (formerly known as drawers from a broken dresser). I gave each boy a basket filled with their eight bundles, and sat it on top of their dresser. Easy to see. Easy to use. No digging through the dresser dumping clothes everywhere. Then I made seven pajama bundles each. I don't have any place to put two more baskets, so I took a risk and put them in the top drawer of the dresser. This is a gamble. For reasons I do not understand, my boys do not seem to understand how to open a drawer, pull out only the clothes they need, and then close the drawer back up. I'm hoping if they only do it for pajamas, and they are already pre-bundled, that maybe they will be able to handle it. If not, I'm taking their jammies away and they'll have to sleep naked. I doubt they'll protest much.
Once I had a weeks worth of clothes all bundled up, I turned back to see a monstrous pile of clothes still left behind. So I hung up all the extra shirts on a high rack in the closet hopefully out of reach. Then I stashed away a few extra pairs of pants, undies, and socks just for emergencies. And then.....and then.... I boxed up the rest and gave them all away! Whoohoo! A month ago my boys had forty outfits each, so I got rid of half of them. Twenty outfits each didn't seem like too much. I was wrong. So today I cut their clothes down to eight outfits each, and it feels GOOD! I am only doing laundry once a week, and if they run out of clothes by then, I don't care! Mwahahahaha! I feel so free! What will I do with all that extra time? I'll let you know.
Marcia
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