Laundry?

This is one of my favorite frequently asked questions that I receive as a mom of thirteen children. As our family has continued to grow, one can imagine that our laundry system would grow and improve with it. I can not emphasize enough how important it is to have a routine and follow through on it every single day if you want to have a well run and stress free home. Not only is the routine important, but so is teaching our kids the importance of responsibility and teamwork through the process of the big chore that is laundry. Some often forget that with growing young children, not only does your laundry system need to be consistent, but their clothes need to be rotated out according to larger sizing and the weather. For that to run smoothly, we have large storage containers holding clothes according to their size, climate, and gender, making switching clothes out a smooth transition. Our family is so blessed to have a laundry room that accommodates all of our children’s dressers, as well as easily accessible attic doors that lead to our not-in-use clothing storage bins. Each bedroom in the house gets a specific laundry day, where all the kids who sleep in that room gather up their laundry and wash it, dry it, fold it, and put it away in their organized drawers. They have the entire day to finish all of their laundry, which usually ranges to about two to three loads per room every week. 

This is the Murrey Family Laundry System, and it works exceptionally well… except the fact that my house is neither well run or stress free. 

In a perfect world, this system would be perfect for a large family, but I forgot to mention how reality comes into play in the Murrey Family Laundry System. For example, Tuesday is laundry day for the girl’s room, which is about 2-3 loads every week. Tuesday is also the day where we go to extracurricular activities in the afternoon and evening, do school, take care of littles, and all of the other chores around the house. While I do prioritize teaching our children independence and necessary life skills like laundry, this sometimes comes at the expense of laundry not getting done at all that day. Sometimes there is the classic excuse of “I forgot” while other times it is out of our control entirely, such as the washer being broken, a stomach bug plagues the house and all the blankets and clothes need washed from that, or I forgot to buy more detergent. If our laundry room is out of order for even one day, we are set back 2-3 loads of laundry. This can very quickly get out of hand when you are still catching up on laundry from previous missed days, and frankly our entire day can not revolve around the laundry getting caught up. 

We do actually have a storage system in place in our laundry room, but over time the clothes have all become disorganized and forgotten in the attic storage closets. It is nice that the storage closets have doors I can keep shut, it makes it seem almost like I do not have an entire pile of laundry to deal with on top of the several others that I am trying to sort out. The main reason they became disorganized in the first place brings me to my next point about teamwork and accountability. Even if the kids don’t follow the laundry system I have put in place, they still are confronted with laundry themed problems they need to solve as a unit, which sometimes requires a little creativity and digging. They found enough clean clothes in the storage bins to put off laundry day another week, leaving what they did not want or could not wear behind in the storage closets. No, it was not really a sustainable solution, but they come to learn that lesson  another day, otherwise known as Laundromat Day. 

Realistically, we can not function as a home at all if laundry gets piled too high, and the washer and dryer can only do so many loads a day. Laundromat Day is more of a laundromat week, and we utilize that week to reset the entire laundry system in the house. Some kids will come with me to rotate the laundry at our local laundromat, others will stay home re-organzing the drawers, cleaning the laundry room, putting away clothes no one can wear at the moment, and donating excess clothes we no longer need. Last summer we had a week where we reset the entire laundry room, and we received a lot of help from close friends and family in the process. 

So, laundry is probably how you would expect from a family of 15 – unruly and chaotic. In all fairness, laundry was unruly and chaotic with four kids as well, so maybe my family is just bad at laundry and the amount of people is not as impactful of a factor as I think it is sometimes. The laundry situation in our home has weirdly taught me a lot of lessons about being a mother and raising my children – the point is not to have an immaculate home where everything runs smoothly no matter what. In the chaos of it all, I have gotten to see my children find ways of taking care of each other, teaching the others how to independently handle getting dressed and doing laundry, but most importantly how much their place in the family is needed and valued. They have not learned this lesson perfectly, but I think it is catching on, at least to the middle children. In the meantime, if you see one of my children in a halloween costume and sweatpants on a mid-July day, it’s probably an indicator that Laundromat Day is next week.