BigFamiliesBigIdeas: Kids and Clothes: How do you keep track of hand me downs?! We get great ones from cousins, and by the time they reach the youngest they've been worn by 5 kids, but I have a hard time finding space and managing/keeping track of all the clothes!

Hand me downs can be a mainstay in clothing a family. They can also be a real bear to organize, to keep organized, and to make sure you have them available to actually use. It's such a frustrating feeling to come across a cute outfit, (or a whole bag or box!) and realize that your child has already outgrown it. Especially if it's something that you didn't know you had, so you went out and bought another one!

This was my situation for years: I knew I had clothes for my kids, I just didn't know where they were, and I didn't want to wade through the boxes in my basement to find them. Especially since I didn't really even know what was there, or if it was worth my time to even look. And when it came time to pass my kids' clothes on to my good friend Marcia (my perennial clothes trading buddy), I would look around and gather up a respectable amount of clothing, and send it on - not knowing for sure if I was sending all of the clothes in whatever size, or even if I was sending complete outfits.

I knew there had to be a better way.

Oh sure, I had my moments. I would spend a whole day (or more) sorting every item of clothing my kids had ever worn, or that I was planning on them ever wearing. I would have piles designated for every size in both genders, laid out in rows, taking over my house. Then I would box everything up, label it, and stack those boxes up, with high hopes that this newfound organization would last, and I'd be able to find everything I wanted, when I wanted it.

Unfortunately, my system wasn't perfected, yet. The labeled boxes were a good start, but as my kids would outgrow clothes or as the seasons changed, I would throw everything into a garbage bag or a laundry basket - to deal with later. Which meant that fairly soon I was back to my massive piles of clothes to dig through, hoping to find what I needed.

I knew there had to be a better way.

The turning point came sometime after my fourth child was born. A messy "system" like the one I was using might be manageable for one or two kids, but had become nearly impossible to navigate with three kids. I knew there was no way this baby girl would ever wear clothes in her correct size if I didn't do something about this.

I began with one of those marathon Clothes Organizing Days. Only this time, instead of using whatever boxes I could find, in all different crazy sizes, I used identically-sized moving boxes. This made it easy to stack (no more losing one box behind another), easy to find what I was looking for (only one thing written on the box - the size and gender of the clothes inside), and easy to open and close (no old tape and missing box flaps).

Even if I didn't have enough clothes in any particular size to fill up the box, I used the same size box anyway. At the end of the day, I was rewarded with a spectacular stack of boxes, full of clothes from size 0-3 months, to around size 6, sorted by size and gender. I think I had twenty boxes.

But I didn't stop there. I'd gotten to this point before, and it hadn't really lasted. I also designated one laundry basket as the "to be sorted" spot. This was the landing place for any single item one of my kids outgrew mid-season, or for a bag of hand me downs a neighbor passed on, or the winter coat I found on sale for next year. Anything that didn't belong in my kids' drawers at the moment, got tossed into that basket. And when the basket was full, or when I had a few minutes to spare, I'd go through the basket and toss each item into it's designated box. That way, even if I didn't always take the time to fold everything neatly with its matching top, it was at least in the box. And if I got hand me downs in a size larger than my kids were wearing, I would simply take out a new box, write the new size on it, and put them into it.

At the end of each season, I just take the empty (labled) box that corresponded to the size they are just outgrowing, and basically dump their dresser and closet into it. Then I'd grab the next-size box, and put all those clothes into their dresser and closet. So simple, so neat.

Right now, in a closet in our playroom (I don't have a basement or an attic in this house), I have probably around fifteen plastic bins - over the years I have "upgraded" to 18-gallon plastic bins - in every size from what my youngest to my oldest are wearing right now (currently boys' 4T to 12 years and girls' 7/8 to Jr 3). Their labels are clear and facing out, and even my kids know how to find the bin that holds their clothes and search for another pair of jeans or a sweater.