Mornings Are Hard

January 20, 2015


Mornings Are Hard
Getting children ready in the morning can be a challenge. Add in pets to take care of, parents who have to get ready for work, and differing schedules, and you’ve got a recipe for chaos. Planning ahead is the key to success. Many people choose to pick out their clothing the night before, but I can’t always guarantee I will be home at a decent time, or remember to do it on hectic nights, so I do the entire week at once. It has made mornings so much easier!
First, I set up a weekly organizer. Finding the right sizes, colors and quantities were the hardest part of this. I ended up using these stacking organizers I found in the kitchen section at Wal-Mart. They came 3 in a pack for about $5, so they were affordable enough to stock up on. I chose to do only kids’ clothing first, so I needed 15 (3 kids, 5 days). I opted not to do weekend outfits as we rarely leave the house on weekends. Since I could only find white bins, I needed to color code them myself. I used a roll of duct tape in each of their colors and just put a strip on the front. It needed to be visible when the containers were full, but it wasn’t necessary to cover the entire bin. I used the leftover tape to identify laundry baskets and other containers, but more on that later.
On the inside of each bin, I wrote the day of the week. It only had to be visible when filling the containers, so I just wrote it with a marker inside.

daily outfit organizer

I then stacked them according to height, and lined them up for the week. This made it easier for my youngest to figure out which one to grab, since she was still learning the days of the week. Everyone grabbed from the same stack on the same day.

In each bin, I placed socks, underwear, pants, shirt, and matching accessories if needed (bow, belt, etc.). Everything they needed was ready to go.

weekly outfit organizer

We have our shoes in a separate organizer, but you could include them in a weekly clothing organizer if you wished. We no longer spent precious time hunting for the right pieces, and Daddy no longer dressed the children in off-season, ill-fitting clothes.

How it works: as I take clothes out of the dryer, or go through closets for already put away clothes, I match the outfits and fold them together. Since I only do Mon-Fri, I have all weekend to get it together. If I am washing clothes during the week, I will fold the outfits I want and separate them, and the kids put the rest of the clothes away. This way, when the organizer is emptied on Friday mornings, I have most everything ready to fill it for the next week. You could do it all Sunday night, or two weeks at a time, or whatever works for you. As long as everything is ready to go Monday morning, you can’t go wrong.