Organizing Tips
Befriending the Laundry Monster

by Bernadine Sevy

I decided to spring clean the children’s rooms.......

I ended up with 40 loads of laundry, this is embarrassing because it says a lot about my house keeping skills.  I hauled it all down to the Laundromat, used 20 washers and 20 driers and had it done in 2 hours.  Then I hauled it all home and had the children separate it into their own piles.  One at a time I had them bring down their clothes and some of them hated what I did next.

I decided that they obviously had way too many things to wear and so I had them pick 4 outfits for regular wearing, 2 that were really nice and one for chores.  Two sets of pajamas and they got to keep all their socks and underwear.  (I have decided that this is a big mistake  after looking all week at 3 baskets of unmatched socks.  I’m going to fix this mini monster too!)

Next I used a tip that I learned at a recent home schooling convention, this idea is from a mother of 17.  I assigned each child a color, making it easy for myself,  I used their favorite color.  Johanna likes aqua, David - green, Rachel - white etc.  I use a small safety pin and pin the bead in an obvious place in the garment, generally on the brand tag.    Now it is really easy to sort clean wash into individual baskets for folding.  This brings me to my next tip.

This idea I got from a great website with a wonderful newsletter called Simple times.  (Put in URL) In my laundry room I have placed a shelving unit.   I bought it at Target, it is 18 inches deep and the 5 shelves hold 10 bins easily, one for each member of the family.  The shelf is next to the drier and clothes go straight from the drier into the bins for the children to fold and put away. 

One morning, before I installed this system, I came downstairs to find that Johanna and Rachel had created a monster out of the wash by piling baskets and boots in a creative fashion.  I laughed in grim fashion, a not so funny joke.  Now I find that things are a little better.  I have tried having the children do their own laundry but the washer runs 24 hours a day and it didn’t work out to well.  I find that it is better to assign a child a day to help with the family wash.  They  can all sort by color and  sort the beaded laundry from the drier into the correct bins.  Best of all they appreciate the fact that there is always lots of wash to do when everything clean or dirty gets thrown back into the wash.  Yesterday, Jacob, my 8 year old, had the opportunity to help with the wash.  He got really irritated: “ Hey!  I saw this stuff on the stairs yesterday!  Why is it back in the wash?”  I grinned.  “Exactly!”  I said.  I had an laundry-monster-slaying-allie.