Dots (Laundry, Life and Loving Your Kids)

Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy - "Dots"

My wife assures me that there are only three boys living in our house. However, judging from the amount of laundry we do, I seriously doubt that. To account for this much clothing I am pretty sure we are housing an entire little league team, a cub scout pack and the Vienna Boys Choir.

We wash a lot of laundry.

How much laundry you ask?

• Well, we have more laundry baskets than humans.
• The amount of lint we remove from the dryer lint trap in one week is larger than our cat.
• We buy suitcase-sized boxes of detergent at Sam’s Club as frequently as we buy milk (we really should just get a cow, by the way).
• Going to bed each night means finding a new location to move all the clean clothes we really, really meant to get hung up.
• A constant hum fills the house from either the washer or dryer or both.
• There is no such thing as the laundry actually being done. It is simply in a perpetual state of getting done, with each load somewhere on the never-ending cycle of dirty, washed, dried, folded (maybe), put away (doubtful), and dirty again.

But that is just the way it is with three young, active boys. Either we run our own laundry mat or they run around naked (don’t encourage them … they will do it). And to make the situation more difficult, the boys have this bad habit of growing all the time, and not always all their body parts at once, so it can be quite a challenge to figure out which pants go with which boy each week.

So with this much laundry to wash and sort, we needed a system to make things more efficient. Now I may not be the most “domestic” person around, but I did come up with a pretty neat idea (I try to get at least one good one per year). It is something I call the dot system.

Basically we needed a system that clearly and easily identified which clothes belong to which child, and also allowed us to move the clothes down the ranks to the next son in line when one boy outgrew them. Here’s how it works ...

Most all clothes have some sort of tag on them (although tagless clothes are becoming popular). Anyway, most shirts have a tag inside the back of the neck or inside where the seam is on the side. Likewise, most pants have a tag inside the back waistband. What we do is take a permanent marker and make a single dot on the tag for any clothes belonging to our oldest son, Carter. Our next younger son, Mason, gets two dots on his tags. And finally our youngest, Grant, gets three dots on his.

When Carter outgrows an item, we simply add one more dot to his tag, and now it has two dots and belongs to Mason. A year later we add a third dot to its tag and Grant receives the clothing.

With this system we can very quickly check tags and sort the clothing into three stacks, one for each boy. Better yet, the boys themselves can go through the clean laundry and pull out their own clothing and put it away. Well, at least hypothetically this is possible. When it comes to boys putting away laundry, your actual mileage will vary.

So this has proved to be a great time saver and chore motivator. However, it has also served another purpose. Sometimes, the dots make me a little sad.

I’ll see Mason tearing through the house in a two-dot shirt that I remember Carter wearing last year on the hayride. And I know it won’t be long before a third dot is added and it’s Grant bouncing on the backyard trampoline wearing it. And then soon after that (if it has survived the three amigos) the shirt will get bagged up and dropped off at Goodwill or sent over to some friend with younger boys.

Time really does fly, and dots get added, and boys grow up, and life moves on. I know this firsthand because we also have a 19-year-old daughter who I swear just yesterday was learning how to ride her bike, probably while wearing a dress because she insisted on always wearing a dress. But now she is in college and does her own laundry (well except for when she can get home for the holidays).

Dots are good because each time we add one it reminds us that our kids are growing up and time is short and we need to cherish every moment we can. We need to spend as much time as we can making memories with our kids, so when we do give away or pass on those old clothes we will picture all the hikes in the woods, soccer games in the front yard and bike rides around the neighborhood.

And if these activities keep you too busy to get all your laundry put away, don’t worry about it. Trust me, there will always be more laundry tomorrow.