Summer chaos at home driving you nuts? I remember those days of having kids at home and feeling like I was barely keeping up. Herding cats, shoveling sand against the tide, whatever you call it–it can feel quite defeating. You want to enjoy your time with them, but they’re such slobs. I’ll give you a couple things that helped me through the slog of long summers with lazy preteens.
Back about 25 years ago we had a problem in our house – – it seemed we never had any towels. I knew we owned towels, since we had six kids living at home–we had to have towels. Meanwhile, we had a teenage daughter who had a terribly messy room. One day Jay and I just decided to clean it while she was at school, thinking she needed a reset, and maybe we can clean up her act going forward. What we found was 19 towels. We washed them all and put them back in the linen closet, and in no time we were out of towels again. No amount of asking, begging, or threatening worked.
I had a crazy idea that fewer towels might make life easier. I pulled all of the towels out of service, they weren’t great anyway, and we had a pool, so I used them as back ups when kids’ friends were over. I bought 16 new white towels, because when you have six kids, everything adds up. I wrote each of their names on the decorative band of every towel, in capital letters with a Sharpie. The towels still went missing for a while, but there is some level of sibling peer pressure, followed up by the punishment of having to wash all the towels when anyone was found to have towels with a sibling’s name on the floor of your room–that it actually made a difference. So much time has passed since that change, but somehow, two moves, and about 25 years later, a few ‘monogrammed’ towels still exist in our home.
Speaking of laundry, it’s impossible to keep up with when you have six kids! I know a family in Westminster who had a lot of kids at the same time we did. Multiple people told me that the kids always did the dishes, the dinner, clean up, etc. I’ve never had much luck depending on kids to do regular chores, and I just didn’t have the time or patience to wait for someone to unload the dishwasher when I would be cooking and dirtying more dishes. The trash needed to be emptied when it was full, not when the kid who had a checkbox on a chart was available.
I needed to come up with something creative for our specific situation. The solution would have to be self-policing, and self-punishing if the chore didn’t get done. Laundry. Here’s a novel idea: the kids do their own laundry (it works)! We put 10 years old as the starting point, and it worked. I was no longer constantly irritated by kids not doing their chores, and if they didn’t have clean clothes, it was up to them to fix that. By the time they were teenagers, they all had an awareness of washing similar colors and materials together, stain removal techniques, and other valuable life skills. In fact, when our oldest was stationed overseas in the Marine Corps, he was the go-to guy for stains.
Inevitably, when you have a lot of people doing laundry in your house, you’re constantly at risk of having somebody else’s clothes in the way of your own progress. This solution actually only came in to play a few years ago, and I sure wish I thought of it sooner. Enter the CLEAN and DIRTY signs. Our laundry room can quickly get out of control. I bought a few genuine laundromat carts (regular laundry baskets will also work, but can also disappear when they are carried out of the laundry room–not so with the heavy wheeled cart). I also printed and laminated several CLEAN and DIRTY signs (reversible, actually). Now, no matter whose clothes they are and whether they are left in the washer or the dryer, there’s a place to move them and there’s no confusion as to what’s clean and what’s dirty.
Want your own CLEAN and DIRTY signs? Just drop me a message and I’ll either pop some in the mail to you, or leave them at my office pick up bin for you.
