Didn’t you wear that yesterday?

Our family is kind of big, and I find that my kids will wear the same clothes day after day after day after day after………

It’s difficult to keep up with everyone and remember what they wore the previous day so from time to time we institute what I call “cycling” (as in cycling through their clothes).  Here are two ideas that I came up with, the first one I have done and the second one we are trying out now.

 

1) arrange their clothes in outfits and then put then in this arrangement into their clothing drawers and I tell them to cycling through their clothing, wearing this outfit one day, and the next in line the next day. This works well except for when some clothes experience more wear and tear and say a pair of pants will have to match with two shirts so we can’t put them in outfits. When this happens, I came up with the idea:

2)Have them to draw pictures of their clothes (nice, fun kid activity). Then, put the pictures under the days of the week on the wall. Then we assign the wearing of a certain shirt for a particular day and they can look at the picture to see what to wear that day and I can quickly look at it to see that they do not have the same clothes on….. 

 

Taming the Laundry Monster?

One day several years ago, I emptied out all the clothes (malaabis) and to my dismay, I saw several articles of my infant daughter’s clothing (mostly purples and pinks) stained with mold.  I had three other older children and they had mostly of browns, blues, etc. and these were always the clothes that I concentrated on first.   At that point, I knew I needed a better system for my laundry (ghaseel).  I couldn’t afford to have all my baby daughter’s clothing ruined.  We had just moved to a little village (qaryah) in Egypt (Masr)  and at that time I didn’t know where to find quality clothes for babies (atfaal).   

Pre Sorting 

The first thing I noticed about laundry was that it was time consuming sorting through the clothes each time I wanted to wash.  So the first step was to permanently sort the clothes. At the time I only had grocery bags to use (Alhamdulillah I eventually upgraded to clothes baskets) for each color.  Eventually I made up some laundry tags to designate the different clothes baskets.  I found that these could be helpful for learning color words as well. The tags have the English color word, plus the Arabic and the English transliteration.  I only have about 5 or 6 different color piles (some like colors are combined) but there are twelve labels.  So at that point, whenever I went to wash clothes, I just picked up the basket of the colors I was going to wash for that day. I didn’t have to sort through the clothes every time I wanted to wash. 

Scheduling 

At this point, I had begun to start saving time just by already having the clothes sorted out. But I was still falling into the habit of washing the browns, blues, etc. So I set up a weekly (usbuwiyyah) schedule so that I could cycle more effectively through the different colors. I have a household schedule form on TJ where I can put my washing schedule, housecleaning schedule, hygiene and other household tasks. For the laundry, I basically assigned each group of colors a day.  I have about five color groups so the extra two days of the week are for catching up in case I didn’t wash on a particular day or just rest from the laundry.  

 I have been on this system for about five years Alhamdulillah and it has taken some of the uggh out of laundry. I stay on top of the laundry now with 8 kids better than I did with  4, masha Allah. There have even been many times when I looked at the clothes baskets to find that there was not a single article of clothing in any of the baskets (ok it was short lived, maybe till the end of the day or till someone had an accident, but still a wonderful sight). And of course the schedule kind of gets off when we move, but masha Allah, it’s usually relatively easy to get back on track.