Piles

We had another busy weekend. I was actually hoping for a slightly quieter one, but you get what you get. We at least were home this weekend, which meant that we had a lot of catching up to do from last weekend's trip to my cousin's wedding. We had piles of laundry to go through--clean and dirty. The clothes we'd managed to get washed over the last week end up in a clean pile in front of the couch in our bedroom--where they're supposed to be folded. The dirty ones just overflow our various hampers (is 5 hampers too many for 3 people? hmmm..).

Plus, this week a friend brought over a ton of her daughter's outgrown clothes that we had to sort through. I enjoy getting these because they quickly fill Charlotte's closet with cute clothes--many are in excellent condition, and the ones that aren't will just go to daycare, where she'll add more paint and red jello stains anyway. Plus, there are always a handful of adorable dresses that are in near perfect shape. I also love shopping for Charlotte, and it's nice to be able to buy her a couple of slightly more expensive outfits. I don't buy anything too outrageous--no $200 baby dresses--but $50 total for a jumper, sweater, shirt, and matching tights is way more than I would spend if I were supplying an entire closet full of clothes in every size. Anyway, the buckets of new-to-us clothes got added to the piles of laundry on the floor.

Our laundry process goes something like this: 1) Decide on the next load to be done(i.e. is someone out of jeans or underwear or towels or is the pile of red's overflowing into the hall...) 2) Extract the clothes from the appropriate hamper(s). There is one in our room, one in Charlotte's, and 3 hanging ones in the laundry room that's right off the kitchen--one for towels, one for Charlotte's things (mostly dirty bibs), and a third for everything else. 3) Wash and dry clothes, preferably within the same 24 hour period. If things sit in the washer longer than that, they probably get a second washing. Yes, this happens fairly frequently. 4) Carry dry clothes upstairs to our room and dump them in a pile on the floor. 5) Fold/hang and put away the laundry. Ideally this happens within a short period of step 4, but generally there's a small hill of clean clothes on our bedroom floor.

The best I can say for this system is that generally the clean pile is larger than the dirty pile. And, thanks in part to the generosity of friends with older daughters, we all have enough clothes in our closets to make it through the average 2-week cycle time of our laundry.