In our house, everyone helps out. I feel it's a very important part of raising a child to teach them basic homemaking and personal care skills. Laundry is one of those skills. I'm going to be honest- I don't do TOO much seperating for laundry but we do have some.
We have 4 main baskets: one for towels and cloth napkins, one for adult laundry (Gracie's is in this one too), one for kid laundry and one for diapers. All the towels and napkins are washed on HOT. I don't have the kid laundry seperated unless it's something crazy dark or bright (like Morgan's new tie-dye shirt she got at the beach). I seperate the adult laundry into whites, colors and jeans. All of the above gets washed on warm or cold (depending on what it is.)Diapers all get washed together. (These have a special wash routine themselves.) If there is anything 'special' that gets washed alone I do it as well (things like handwash silk skirts, etc)
Drying: all towels, napkins, undies and PJs get dried in the dryer. The kids playclothes get dried as well. Everything else (essentially all the 'nice' clothes) get hung to dry. I've found this eliminates shrinkage and it makes the clothes last MUCH longer.
Stains: I have 4 crazy kids, a messy husband and I, myself, am pretty clumsy. I elminate stains as much as possible for myself by wearing an apron about 90% of the time at home (while cooking, cleaning,etc) BUT....I can't force everyone else to- so I'm forced to deal with stains.
My stain 'secret' is 1 part Oxyclean to 1 part colorsafe bleach in a sinkfull of warm water. Let the item soak overnight and it's generally gone. Letting a wet item dry in the full sun outdoors normally will 'sun' a stain away. Of course I have a stain removal chart I use for fun things like ink pen and such, but luckily those stains are much less common around here. I've only ever had 2 things that I couldn't get stains out of and they were mine!!!! (white shirts with TONS of tomato sauce on them- that'll teach me to wear a white shirt and no apron while canning tomatoes)
As for actually doing the laundry. I do a lot of it. Morgan and Raelyn generally do the kid laundry basket though. They bring down all the clothes and Morgan starts the washing machine according to the chart and star stickers on the machine. When finished washing she switches to the dryer (or hangs to dry on the indoor clothesline in the laundry room). There are stickers on both the washer and dryer to make it EASY PEASY! Occasionally she'll also do the towel/napkin basket. I'm the only one who does adult laundry or diapers.
The kiddos at Bounce-U today. I would've had more pictures if I hadn't been sitting on the bounce equipment- all the rest are SUPER blurry.
Klacki (what they call my mom) had a birthday (number to be unmentioned) this past Friday. These are 'her' cupcakes. Yeah right......
And the sweetie who will be getting it on Christmas morning. (she'll be 10 months then!!!)
AND....she got her first 'real' haircut. I've trimmed one side of her hair before (it grows VERY uneven) but I finally did the whole back. She had a 'hairline' underneath all the wispy hairs on top so I just evened everything out to the 'hairline'. Makes me a little sad, but looks a lot more presentable.
More pictures can be found at the following link:
