Organization: Children's Clothes

We have visited this topic in my blog before. Click here to read the previous entry. I'd like to expand on this topic a bit. When organizing your children's clothes, do you organize by pants and shirts or do you organize by outfits? Since my children are younger, I usually try to organize by outfits. However, I inevitably end up with a stack of T-shirts and then some jeans leftover. I put those in a separate drawer.

It is a matter of preference. Just wondering how other parents handle their children's clothes?

Also another idea in regards to clothes....as I noticed this week, my children seem to have a lot of clothes! I'm still keeping up with the weekly laundry for the kids' laundry. See my previous post. Meaning I still have one day of the week that I do all of the kids's laundry. I've been doing this since I posted about it and it's been working out really well. Anyway, it seems no matter how much I simplify the children's clothes, it seems the clothes continue to multiply. I was thinking about this earlier this week and decided, at my Mom's suggestion, that I would take an outfit out for each of them and just leave it in a canvas bag in the bag of my van. A "just in case" bag of clothes. Inevitably just as their clothes seem to multiply all on their own, there also seems to be a tendency at times to be in need of an extra pair of clothes! Usually it's a visit to the beach, where we don't plan to go in the water (read: we are not in bathing suits) and the kids end up in the water and soaked! An extra outfit in the van would come in handy at these times. Last week, it was during our visit to the zoo. My son went down the slide at the picnic area and there was a puddle at the bottom! We could have used an extra outfit then too.

Plan ahead, if you can relate to my experiences, just pack an extra outfit for each child in a bag and leave it in the back of the van or car. It won't take up much space.

Got Kids? Get Them Involved!

Do you have children? If so, get them involved in your process of simplifying. Yesterday, I was doing the kids’ laundry. Now this just worked out for me. I do laundry on most days. Today though, I did all of the kids laundry. After each load, I gathered the kids around with me and we all folded. First they sorted the laundry into piles - socks, underwear, shorts, pants and shirts. Then we each chose a sorted pile to fold. Now, my son did the underwear and socks. Daughter did shorts and pants. I folded the shirts. =)

It worked out really well! At the time, I noted to myself to add this to my blog and definitely add this to weekly list of chores! Yay! 10 points for Mom! =)