Laundry Mountain

I’m busy today.  I seem to have gotten to the stage of sleep deprivation where I feel like the energizer bunny.  I hope it lasts through dinner and getting the kids in bed!

Last night when Miss C woke to nurse I realized that our laundry piles had taken over the rocking chair.  Uh oh.  Today I had to address the problem.  When the clean laundry starts to look like this, all stacked together and starting to compress and merge, we refer to it (not affectionately) as “laundry mountain.”   It happens at least every other week.  Five kids make a lot of laundry.  There is a foot stool in there, somewhere.  I think.

I try to run the kids’ laundry separately, and have them put it away right after, but it doesn’t always work that way.  And when it spends too long stacked up items seem to migrate to new baskets.  So it all had to be sorted.  My husband checks all the tags when he sorts.  I have started just eyeballing it.  Notice the colors on the baskets, one color for each kid and each kid has two baskets so they have one to fill while one is being washed (and then often engulfed by laundry mountain.)

All sorted!

The two baskets in the back are mine.  Putting my own laundry away it usually way at the bottom of the to-do list, and I have been living out of laundry baskets for the past few weeks.   Mom life.

The kids are responsible for putting away their own laundry.  R and Big A have to do it themselves.  O is almost there, and Little A does it with a lot of help.  They are responsible for it.  That doesn’t mean they do it happily, or willingly, or without spending a few hours have a crying screaming meltdown about how long it takes and how terrible it is that we make them do so much work.  Hah.

I already shared how I handle socks.  I am so, so relieved I don’t have to spend ages sorting socks anymore.

Thoughts on Socks

Of course, there was still the pile of sheets.  Only one of the kids stays dry at night.  Even with pull-ups and nighttime diapers, we go through a lot of sheets.

I came up with my own way to “fold” sheets because it’s such a pain to do so many.  I fold the flat sheet into a long  rectangle (approximately 1 foot by 3 feet.)  Then I bunch up the fitted sheet and pillowcase and roll it all together.  We had eight twin sheet sets from the last two weeks, plus four crib sheets and our king set.  Fun.

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Then I put my laundry and the linens away, and the laundry was all done!*  It only took 2 hours (and that was with minimal interruptions.  Groan.)  And it shouldn’t have to be done again for, well, maybe a few days?

*Except for the load in the washer, and the one in the dryer, and the two loads waiting to be washed, and O’s laundry which I haven’t asked him to put away yet, and Miss C’s which I didn’t put away because she was sleeping.  But it’s as done as it gets.