Family Closet

For years, we have had a family closet. I got this idea from the MOMYS list. I mentioned this in my post on laundry. Our family closet has varied depending on the space available and the number of children using it. We use it only for the youngest children. Right now, it’s the 3 youngest. It was the 4 youngest,  but when we rearranged recently, our 14 year old moved her clothes upstairs.

I like the family closet for a couple of reasons. When I kept clothes in the kids’ rooms, they didn’t take very good care of them. Instead of putting clean clothes away properly, they often ended up on the floor. Then, they got mixed up with the dirty clothes and I ended up getting unworn, clean clothes back in the laundry. I get really irritated when clean clothes end up in the laundry pile. And, it seems that clothes in the kids’ bedrooms are just a recipe for a mess. So, we keep the bedrooms for beds, the kids’ personal belongings and a few toys.

After I’ve washed and sorted the laundry, the big folks take their laundry to their bedroom. The littles put their clothes away in the family closet. We have an alcove in our garage that we are using for the family closet now. I will admit it doesn’t always stay clean. My wonderful husband helped the little guys clean up the area the other day. So, I took advantage of the cleaning job to take pictures for this post.

Each kid has two shelves to put their clothes on.  Or, at least they have the space of two shelves. One of them has bins on the floor in place of one shelf. Another has a basket/shelf combo area. As you can see, the shelves are also used for storing other household items, Costco paper goods, stuffed animals (finally, a place for the stuffed animals!), clothes to grow into, etc.

We have carabiners to hold the tzitzit collection. This works well because it’s easy to get the set they want, but, it closes so they don’t end up falling all over the floor. In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, they wear these on their clothes – usually their belt loops. Numbers 15:39 says “you shall have the tzitzit that you may look upon it and remember all the commandments of Yahweh and do them.”  

We also have a hanging rack for their hanging clothes.

I love this black shelf. My husband got it for me when Borders Books was going out of business. It’s very sturdy and it rolls. We had it in the school room for a long time to hold school supplies. We didn’t need it in there anymore when we added built-in bookshelves. (That’s another blog post for another day.) So, now we’re using it for the baby doll and dress up clothes collection.

And, last, but not least, we have the baby dolls. Lots and lots of well loved baby dolls. 

We have mostly had our family closet in a varying configurations in the garage. Some people have it in their laundry room. Others have made a bedroom into the family closet. If you like the idea, be creative. You'll find a way to do it.

Color Coded Dishes

I’ve been a member of the MOMYS (Mothers of Many Young Siblings) email groups for many years. It has been a lifesaver for me many times. There are several very simple tips I have learned to help out with the everyday chaos of raising a big family.  One of those is color coded dishes. Back before I color coded my dishes, I often had the issue of kids leaving their dishes out on the table or counter, instead of putting them in the dishwasher. And, inevitably, no one knew whose dish it was. Or should I say the dishes belonged to the ever elusive Not Me.

For our dishes, we chose Fiesta ware. Since, this company has been around for a long time, I know that I can get replacement dishes, when necessary. Being a little OCD, I like to know I can get the same dishes, so my stack of dishes doesn’t look mismatched. Breakage is certain to happen, but even with tile floors, it doesn’t happen too often. When we had preschoolers, they used plastic plates. Now everyone has ceramic plates, but I do keep some plastic plates in stock for guests.

For a long time, we used plastic drinking cups – usually Tupperware, because, again, I knew I could replace the cups. But, we are using plastic less and less, so this is our new drinkware. I tried several things to distinguish one glass from another.  I used little stick on drink charms, but they didn’t stay well. Rubberbands were too hard to find in different colors. So, I ordered drink bands from www.drinkbands.com  They work great. We just leave them on the glass and put it in the dishwasher at night, so everyone’s clean glass is ready to go in the morning. The glasses on the left are clean because those kids spent the night at Grammy's and haven't been home all day. The ones on the right are dirty, and I didn't feel like washing them for the picture. Just being real. :)

 With preschoolers, I used a silicone case for the small mouth 8 oz mason jar. These are made for baby bottles, but they fit great on those 8 oz jars. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003SRJTXQ/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1  And, they saved the jars from many a fall onto the ceramic tile in our great room.

So, now I know who left their dish on the table so they can take care of it. And, we know whose cup is whose, so we minimize the number of cups used each day.  Just one of the little things that makes my life easier.

No Spring Cleaning

It’s Passover season! I mean, seriously Passover season. Not Passover is in 3 months season. But, Passover is really close season. HalleluYah! The new moon has come and we have less than 2 weeks. Passover has been on our mind for a couple of months. But, now we’re in the serious preparation phase. 

Since I’ve been blessed to celebrate Yah’s appointed times all my life, this will be my 49^th Passover. We have been rehearsing this for a long time now.  And, over the years, we have done many different things. There were many years where we spent hours and days cleaning our house - Spring cleaning to remove the leaven.  It was a tradition of the church we grew up in. People even cleaned their windows and such preparing for Passover. Other than the natural yeast that is in the air, I’m not sure how much leaven I will find on the windows. I've even cleaned out my linen closets in preparation, but I’m pretty sure no one eats in the linen closet. At least I've never found any leaven in there.

So, we searched the scriptures for instruction on Passover preparation. There isn't a lot of instruction on preparing. Exodus 12:15 says: “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses.” It doesn't say “you shall begin cleaning your house for weeks in advance to make sure every last crumb of leaven has been removed.” It doesn't say, “Clean all your walls and windows so the naturally occurring yeast from the air is disposed of.” Especially since it will come right back.

I've learned a couple of things about preparing for Passover. One is that, no matter how much I clean, I always forget something. It might be that rogue chunk of someone’s leftover toast that was hidden behind the school room organizer. Or it might be that box of leavened something or other that I somehow overlooked and it is right in front of my face. It might be that thing that you never would have guessed in a million years was leavened. I mean, Grape Nuts are way too rock hard to be leavened, right? Wrong. Or, it might be that we forgot to empty the vacuum cleaner bag. Or, maybe the bag of yeast in the freezer.

So, we use a different technique now. A couple of weeks before Passover, I go through our food and set aside leavened foods. I make a list of leavened foods that are in the refrigerator and freezer so we can make sure to use them, or throw them away when the time comes. Then, that’s it, until a day or two before Passover. At that point, we make sure every room has been swept. We don’t really eat much food upstairs, so this can be done a couple of days ahead of time. Then, the day of Passover, we make sure the downstairs floors, especially the kitchen/dining area are swept well. And, just before Passover, we throw away our leavened food. That’s it. Passover cleaning in a nutshell. That means the weeks before Passover I can focus on spiritual things instead of being distracted by physical things. 

Conquering Mt. Washmore

Being a mom of many, I have definitely had my moments (OK, maybe years, not moments) of never being caught up on laundry; or, of having a permanent large pile of clean laundry on my bedroom floor. It never seemed to get folded and put away. We would just rummage through it when we needed something. But, the laundry was always out of control and it drove me nuts!! After much trial and error, I have come up with a solution that has been working well for over 10 years now.

Basically, I wash all the clothes twice a week. Monday and Thursday work best for me.  I don’t have kids wash their own clothes for a few reasons; although, they do help me when I need it. I don’t mind doing the laundry myself. As I do it, I can make sure the clothes are in good condition and pull out any torn or outgrown clothes, etc. I also don’t want to compete for time in the washing machine if others in the house are trying to do their own laundry. And, I don’t want people running tiny loads of laundry when I can fill up the washer.

We have several spots where we collect dirty clothes – one in the garage, where we keep all the younger kids’ clothes, one in the master bedroom and one in the kids’ bathroom upstairs. In the morning, I have the kids round up the dirty clothes and take them to the garage.  I sort them into piles by color. I know many people that don’t separate their colors, but I like to do my best to keep the colors from becoming muddy, hoping to be a good steward of the clothing God has given us. In the picture below, I have 5 piles of regular laundry. Behind those, I have a basket of cold water wash, which I usually only do once a week.

My laundry room isn’t very large and it has 2 doors and cupboards that open onto it, so keeping  anything on the floor in the laundry room doesn’t work well. Since my garage is just outside the laundry room, it’s a good place to sort the clothes. When a load comes out of the dryer, I take it back to the garage where I have an area set up for laundry.  The setup has varied over the years, depending on the space in the garage and on how many kids I am doing laundry for. This is our basic setup now. Each kid has a basket of their own, and I use one basket for my husband and me.

I set the basket of freshly cleaned clothes on the table and start sorting.  The upper shelf is for the older kids. The basket on the far left of that shelf is giveaways. So, when things are outgrown, they go into that basket. (I used to have a whole system for storing outgrown clothes to save them for the next child, but we don’t need that anymore.) My basket is on the left of the table. And, the younger kids’ baskets are under the table. I simply pull a piece of clothing out of basket and put it in the basket of the person who owns that item. If it goes in my basket, I fold it first. The blue basket on the floor in the picture is socks. I throw all socks in there and everyone finds their own. (Although, last week I did attempt sorting socks into each basket again. We’ll see if that lasts.)

Simple as that – as each basket comes from the laundry room, I sort it. I rarely let the baskets of clean clothes pile up. This way, when the kids say “Mom, have you seen my (insert specific item of clothing here)” I can either tell them I remember washing it and it’s in their clean clothes basket. Or, I might tell them it’s in a certain dirty clothes pile. And, of course, there are those times when I don’t know where their missing clothing is. (As a matter of fact, right now, two kids are looking for their rock climbing shirts in the dirty clothes pile.)

To help me sort clean clothes, each child is assigned a certain number of dots. For instance, my oldest daughter gets one dot put on the tag of her clothing. My second daughter gets two dots, and so on. One thing I would change to this system is that I would not do a 1, 2, 3 dot for the boys and a 1,2,3 dot for the girls, basically because, in my case, a boy/girl of similar size ends up with the same number of dots. Usually that’s not a problem, but when we get matching shirts from Sukkot or theater, it’s hard to tell whose is whose. But, we’re too far into the dot system to change it now.

As we get new clothes, we put on the dots before they enter the clothing collection. When clothing gets handed down from one child to the next, we just add a dot. Simple as that. And, it makes sorting laundry so much easier for me!

After the laundry is sorted, each person is in charge of putting away their own laundry. When my children were smaller, and we used the big kid/little kid buddy system, big kids were in charge of putting away their little buddy’s laundry or helping them put it away, depending on the age of the little buddy. But, since my littlest is 6, she is old enough to put away her own laundry. So, everyone does their own. This way, even when clean clothes haven’t been put away in a timely manner, we can still find what we need pretty easily.

In between clothes washing days, I wash towels, sheets and any other miscellaneous stuff that needs to be washed. And, I usually take the weekend off from laundry.