Tackling the Laundry Monster

Have two kids under two is tough...especially when it comes to keeping any sort of schedule because something always comes up.  Someone wants to read a story or not take a nap.  While I love these impromptu moments of cuddling and teaching with my boys, it can make it difficult to get anything done around the house.  Laundry is by far the hardest thing to get done.   Partly this is because my laundry room is near our back door and quite a way (in my toddlers eyes) from the main part of our house.  He does NOT like mommy to leave his sight and so it's usually the cause for a crying/screaming fit when I go out there.  So I try to do it during nap time or at night when daddy is here to distract him.

When it comes to actually doing the laundry, I don't sort colors...I know, bad mommy!  I sort based on these five criteria:

1. Heavy duty clothes -- These are things like jeans, underwear, and socks.  Any kind of clothing that should be washed in warm water for sanitary purposes, but I'm sure won't shrink.  
2. Regular laundry -- The laundry that can we washed and dried in the dryer (mostly this is my shirts and my kids clothes).
3. Air dry things -- Mostly this is my husbands work shirts which are notorious for shrinking if dried with any amount of heat in the dryer...some of my nicer shirts go in this one also.
4. Bathroom towels and bedding -- Pretty self-explanatory.
5. Kitchen laundry -- We mostly use cloth in the kitchen instead of buying paper towels (check out this post) and I don't like to wash these with the bedding/bathroom towels because they have nastier stuff on them (food, bacteria, etc).

I do 1-2 loads a day (depending on whether I am washing cloth diapers or not).  Here is the schedule I try to keep to:

Monday - regular laundry and cloth diapers

Tuesday - bedding/towels

Wednesday - heavy duty laundry and cloth diapers

Thursday - kitchen laundry

Friday - air dry things and cloth diapers

Saturday - catch up day

Sunday - my day of rest :)

We have four people in our home (including the two boys under 2) and this works well for us now.  My hardest chore is getting it all put away promptly without my 19 month old stealing/hiding things.  I have been really wanting to switch to a family closet for ease of getting laundry put away (only one room to go to to put away regular laundry), but so far my husband has not been on board so I wait patiently (most of the time) until he feels more comfortable and/or until I can find a very compelling way to implement this in our house.

This has been posted for Works for Me Wednesday, hosted by We are THAT Family.