Three 3 and Under--Laundry

All those stacks of little clothes......a reminder that we have been triply blessed!

How have I managed in the last few weeks to keep up with the laundry? Well, I do 1-2 loads a day first thing in the morning. Even if some days I have a huge stack of laundry to get done, I force myself not to do more than 2 loads or else I get overwhelmed with walking back and forth to the laundry room. I remind myself I still need to rest and being that I can't leave my toddlers alone in the apartment with the baby, I either need to take them to the laundry room or make sure all 3 are napping when I switch loads. Jer wets through his diapers nearly every night even though we use a very strong, name-brand disposable (he drinks like a fish!) so his sheets and security blanket get washed a LOT! Since Justus prefers to sleep between us on our bed right now, he often wets through onto our sheets or his blankets and then there are my milk-leakage problems so it makes for lots of laundry-doing!

I have a friend who is absolutely obsessed with laundry. (That's why I'm not telling her name here.) She dabs each and every little stain on each and every little thing and she hovers over her washer and dryer like crazy. She obsesses over how much time each article needs to dry and hang dries many things and is always checking the load and feeling which individual pieces are ready or not ready. Frankly, though I love her to death, I want to tell her to get a life. She spends triple the amount of time I do on laundry! I just don't have that kind of time when it comes to clothes that will be instantly re-soiled! She has been accused of dirtying a towel or something just so she can wash a load of laundry and you would be hard-pressed to find an article of dirty clothing in her home. While she folds each item carefully with military precision, I don't bother folding undies at all and often wonder why I even fold Ali's clothes since they go into her clothing tub and are immediately rifled through and unfolded as she changes outfits often (though we've now trained her to only change now when she spills something on her clothes or gets truly dirty).

At this stage of my life I don't even really sort clothes (gasp!) I do usually do a load of whites together once every other week (we don't have many) and I do all the kitchen towels and kitchen washcloths together and my husband's icky work clothes are washed separately, but since I use a scent-free homemade laundry detergent powder, I can mix baby clothes, towels, my clothes, etc. and they all come out fine. I'm not a picky person and at this stage I need to do what is simple! Usually the regular food stains come out fine in the wash without being pre-treated, but for extra-tough stains, I soak the item in a little bucket with some OxiClean Versatile and then throw it in the laundry and it almost always comes out!

One thing that makes laundry-doing easy at this stage of life is to have clothing tubs as opposed to dressers. I fold the laundry on our couch and try to put it away as soon as I can. Since Baby Justus seems to hate the bassinet we got him (thankfully a friend sold it to us at a yard-sale price) we have been storing his clean stacks of laundry there for quick access! Each of the other kids has a clothing tub in their room where I can quickly deposit stacks of clothes. In Jer's tub of clothes there are four stacks, one for pjs, one for pants, one for shirts, and one for complete outfits. As I mentioned before, Ali's tub is a jumble of unfolded clothing as she often goes rummaging through it. And yet...I continue to fold her clothes before she puts them away....go figure! She has a separate little bin for socks and another for undies and lately she's been "delegating" her own laundry chores to Jer, who thinks it is absolutely wonderful fun to put her socks and undies away!

So, my tip for doing laundry for Three 3 and Under is to keep laundry simple and don't sweat the small stuff. No offense to my laundry-lovin' friend! *w*