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How do you do laundry?

I am a creature of habit. I did  my laundry the same way for the first 15 years. I did it once a week, and I would wash, fold and put away by the end of the day. Growing up, my mom always did all the laundry on Monday. She would wash, fold and put away all the laundry for our family of six in one day. It was just how she did, and so it seemed to me like the only way to do it. Why would you want to do it all the time? Why not just get it over with in one day and be done with it for the week?

This theory and method worked great for me for all of my teenage years, all of my college years (it’s especially helpful for when you are lugging all your laundry to a laundry mat!), and for the first few years of marriage. However, once I had my first baby, I quickly realized that this way of doing laundry was not going to work for me! I was frustrated because with a baby with acid reflux, the burp rags, and onesies, and cute little sleepers were piling up WAY faster than once a week! I found myself doing laundry every other day and getting it as far as dry in the dryer, or dry in a laundry basket – but not folded, and definitely not put away!

Over the next five years we added two more kids, but the method stayed pretty much the same. I would toss laundry in as needed (usually every other day) and get it washed and dried and left in the dryer, or a laundry basket…or dumped on the recliner chair in my bedroom, if all the laundry baskets were full! As we added more kids, my piles of clean clothes were multiplying and I was running out of laundry baskets to hold all my clean clothes piles. This would usually end up with me dumping one of the loads on my bed, where I would quickly forget about it until bedtime…at which point I would have to dump it on top of another clean load, or fold it (which was not usually what I did that late at night!).

Out of desperation, I started racking my brain about how I could stop this never ending cycle and I came up with an idea! When the dryer would stop, I would pull the clothes out and shake them out and lay them all in a pile on my bed, so I could fold them when there was a small break in the day. It was a good idea, because it kept the clothes from getting all wrinkled – and I cut down on how many times I needed to run the dryer to get the wrinkles out before I folded the clothes! – but I was still running into the problem of forgetting the clothes until bedtime. So, I switched to laying them in piles on the back of the couch. This actually helped a lot! Piles of clean laundry stacked on the back of the couch weren’t the greatest look, but was right there were I would remember to fold it.

Fast forward to now. We have added one more kid, and my “laundry method” is very close to what it was five years ago when I started my laundry stacking. I changed from doing it “as needed” to twice a week. I now do laundry on Mondays and Thursdays. I’m still stacking the laundry and then folding it when I have time, or often times at night (once the kids are in bed), while I’m watching TV. I even get it put away on the same day…sometimes! But, I have found myself rethinking my method once again, now that my toddler has figured out how to climb up on the couch by himself, and I keep finding him pulling my piles of beautifully neat, flat clean clothes off the couch to drag them around the living room! I found several of his “missing” clean shirts behind the couch a couple days after laundry day last week!

So, I’m up for suggestions! How do you do laundry?