I use a 3-section rolling cart in each bedroom for their dirty laundry (can you tell I like furniture that moves?). Each child gets one section for their regular clothes and the middle section is for denim clothes. I wash each child’s clothes in a separate load using cold water so that I don’t have to sort clean clothes (sorting clothing among 4 boys can take a while). I got that idea from my brother-in-law who always washed his non-denim clothes together in cold water to save money. It works well these days because color-fastness is so much better than it used to be. Also, the separate clothing sections facilitates each child doing his own laundry (which they graduate to when they are 10). For the 5-9 year olds, I wash their clothes and hang up the items that go on hangers, but they have to put up their own clothes that go in the drawers.
The picture on the right shows a clear plastic light switch extender. I found this on-line at several sites which targeted wheel-chair bound adults. I love it because it helps the little ones without embarrassing the older children (who don’t particularly care for the moon and stars or bear motif of most children’s switch extenders).
Tip: to speed sorting of their denim jeans and shorts, I use the “dot” system that I had heard about from another friend. I use a clothing marker to put dots on the tags, where the number of dots corresponds to birth order. So, the first child has 1 dot, the second child has 2 dots, etc.. This works well with clothing that gets passed down as you just add a dot.
