Dorian put up a lazy-laundry-system post in her 7 Quick Takes on Friday, managing (as you can see by the ellipses in the excerpt I pulled below) to stretch it out into several separate takes, since she is a lazy cheater and we can all see through her façade "organized, brilliant web whiz" façade.
So, I read Harvard Homemaker’s post about laundry and was pleasantly surprised to learn that not only do I already understand laundry, but I also do something that was not on the list. I thought “hey, I should write about that. Need something to blog about.”
Then I thought “well, hey, what should I call this tip. It could be ‘Lazy Mom’s Guide to Laundry with Kids.’”
…Anyway: here’s my exciting tip that has no picture because my laundry room is cramped and non-photogenic.
I have a set of shelves in the laundry room and a basket for each family member, along with one for linens. I let the kids make labels for their baskets to add an element of “fun” that lasted for 47 seconds. (Remember, kids: Mom believes that work IS fun!)
When I take a load of laundry out of the dryer, I put each item into the appropriate person’s basket. I do not fold the items.
Once a day, each child is supposed to put away his/her clothes from said basket and return the empty basket to the shelf.
…“How do I handle folding the kids’ clothes?”
Gentle Reader: I do not care.
Since I went to the trouble of describing my similar system in her comments, and I am not posting much, I decided to make it into a blog post. Whee!
I have a similar system, only I do it weekly instead of daily.
We wash and dry baskets as they fill up, one or two a day, so they don’t get too stinky. and we let the clean unsorted laundry pile up in baskets in the laundry room, which is also the kids’ bathroom.
Here's a picture of my unsorted clean laundry, because I'm unafraid to show you the gritty reality of life. You don't get to see the bathroom part, because my nine-year-old ran in to use it while I was framing the photo.
Then on Wednesday afternoons while the 3yo is having a bath and I need to be in there supervising anyway, I sort all the laundry into individual baskets.
Not individual people's baskets, but individual closets' baskets.
My two oldest boys share a room, and I don't wish to devote brain cells to remembering which one of them has black socks and which one of them has white socks, or which one of them has striped underwear and which one of them has solid underwear, or whether we have already handed down this tee shirt from the 13-y-o to the 9-y-o, so all their things get jumbled together in their baskets.
And my daughter and my 3-y-o share a closet in the downstairs hall (where I can supervise them when it is time to put clothes away), so I don't see much point in separating their clothes from each other. She can tell her clothes apart from her brother's perfectly well. So those two kids' clothes get jumbled together in their baskets.
Downstairs (cough) "linens" – tablecloths, napkins, dishcloths, aprons, cleaning rags, etc. — go in another basket. If I finish sorting before the 3yo is done with his bath, I will fold and separate these to make putting them away easier. My stuff goes in my basket and my husband's stuff goes in his basket. Since the upstairs linen closet is right there and nobody else can fold a fitted sheet without making me want to scream at them, I put those things away as I go.
Theoretically the kids are supposed to put their clothes and the downstairs linens away on Thursday mornings, before our co-schooling people show up, and they do unless I forget to tell them to.
So, not too different from Dorian's system, but lower-frequency.
It isn’t totally bump free, but it works well enough, especially since nobody in the entire house gives a flying $%(*# about wrinkles. Thank God I married another engineer.
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