A Little Laundry Thing

  I have had a few people tell me that they "don't know how I manage" with 8 children who are home MOST of the time thanks to our homeschooling lifestyle.

 There are many facets to managing.  One, I'm fairly organized by nature.  (I am not bragging, it is just the way I am.  I have lots of weaknesses, I assure you!)

Two, I have a bunch of older kids who can do a lot.  I have a husband who works hard to train the children to do a lot.

Three, Kevin and I work to improve efficiency as much as possible.

So, All stainlifters mighty pacs are part of our constant war against the laundry.  You can IMAGINE, or maybe you can't, the piles of laundry that grow and multiply in our laundry room.

Our children do most of the laundry.  Angela, age 5, throws laundry down the chute from the dirty laundry baskets upstairs. She then sorts them into the correct baskets (towels, darks, pinks, and whites).

Miriam starts the loads of laundry, then moves them over to the dryer when they are done, then moves them into baskets when the clothes are done drying.  She does at least 2 loads a day, on average, sometimes more.  We have a big front loading washers and dryers so don't have to do as many loads as you might expect.  We still do plenty!

Our big boys fold the clothing and put it in appropriate baskets. They carry the baskets upstairs to the appropriate rooms.  Isaac and Joseph take turns putting their clothes away, as do the big girls.  I am teaching Miriam how to put her, Sarah's and Angela's clothes away, though it is rather slow going as Sarah's are smaller but not so small that telling her clothes, and M. and A.'s clothes apart, is easy.  I put away Daniel's clothing, and my clothing and Kevin's clothing.

Ok, that's a long explanation, let me talk about the All pacs.

One minor bottleneck in the washing process has been pouring soap for the washer.  It used to be that we had a giant container of wash detergent on a shelf in the laundry room. Whenever Miriam started a load of laundry, she needed me to get her the soap as it was too high for her to reach, and she didn't know how much detergent to put in the cup anyway. That proved a problem as often I was frantically busy with something else at the exact moment she needed soap.  She'd ask for it, I'd say "later" and forget about it, and a load wouldn't be started.  (Ok, I think that is very much using a passive verb tense which is not considered good writing, but I'm not going to fix it!) 

So we found these laundry pacs.  Now Miriam just reaches up and grabs a little pac of detergent, which is encased in a soft membrane.  She drops it into the "detergent" slot, and the membrane dissolves at the appropriate time.  And I am out of the process of washing clothes entirely (except for the important part of telling Miriam to move laundry along, which I do frequently.)

It's a little thing, but it is the little things like this that add up.  Any time I'm involved in a chore, it slows things down.  So we're trying to think about ways to remove me from the chore process for streamlining. It also lightens my load!