Color-coded kids??

How many times have you found a pair of scissors (or pencils, or cup, or ... you fill in the blank) in the living room and nobody will admit to leaving them there?  You don't know who it belongs to because it's just a pair of scissors. We resolved this in our house by having every kid pick a favorite color. Each child needs their own color and the colors should be basic, for instance "blue" and not "sky blue".

Once each child has a color, buy everything possible in each kid's color. Some examples of what we have done:

1. Drinking cups
2. Bath towel and washcloth (no they don't match the bathroom decor. We've learned to deal with it).
3. Pack of school pencils
4. Stapler
5. Paper clips
6. Tape dispenser
7. Pencil boxes for individual sets of Sharpies, markers, etc. (Each pen is color-coded too)
8. Scissors
9. Notebooks
10. Book covers
11. Boxes and bins to store stuff in in their room
12. Lunch containers
13. Travel mugs/cups

Following this color scheme, we can also mark items that normally couldn't be labeled. When we go camping or on a picnic and we go through several water bottles, we use colored pony-tail holders from the dollar store around the neck of the bottle. They are easily slipped on and off as we go through bottles.

When we traveled with younger kids, each of them had a rolling backpack or bin in their color (or with their color ribbons tied to the handle or striped in Duct Tape) to contain all of their stuff in the airplane or car.  When we used our travel currency, their assigned poker chip color was their everyday color at home.

Color-coding takes the guess work out of who the "lost" items belong to... if  a red stapler is found in the living room with no child in site, anybody who finds it knows to put it on the owner's desk chair (or a parent may confiscate it and know who to charge if they want it back - but that's another post).

Timeline

When we moved in to a new house, I found a space for almost everything. But by the time everything was put in cabinets and pictures hung on the wall, I discovered I had no wall space left for a timeline. Bummer, I really wanted one of those. So I mentioned (ok whined) to my husband that I didn't have any place for a timeline. He grabbed his keys, went to the local home improvement store and returned with the PERFECT solution.

He hung a fake bamboo roll up blind in our dining room window. It rolls up tight against the top and you don't even notice it's there when it's rolled up. But when it's down, it is the perfect place to put the timeline pieces. Instant timeline space for about $20.

Kid laundry

Teaching kids to sort laundry is a time consuming skill that takes practice. If we start when they are young, they won't end up wearing pink (supposed to be white) T-shirts when they leave home and go off to college. Doing laundry is something that kids can begin helping with at a young age and working up to doing it on their own.

To encourage my kids to sort their clothes as they took it off instead of waiting until laundry day, I put 4 hampers in their bathroom. Labeled with: red, white, dark and light.

Then instead of doing laundry just once a week, we make it part of our daily routine. The child in charge of the laundry zone (our chores are divided into zones) gets 1 hamper from the bathroom, adds any adult's clothes of that color to the bucket and then starts the laundry before breakfast. At lunch time the laundry person moves the clothes to the dryer, and before they play after school work is done, they are responsible to sort the clothes and lay neatly on the couch so everyone can put away their own clothes.

Organization - Kid cothes and shoes

It is often more cost effective to buy kids' clothes when they're on sale rather than waiting until they are needed. But if they don't fit someone right now, what do you do with it? I found it easiest to set up a storage system by size so that when one size was outgrown it could be passed down or passed on to someone else and then the next wardrobe was already ready to unpack without going through several other sizes at the same time. Big boxes can be stacked in closets and little ones can be put up high on shelves that are not used very often.

I buy at resale shops, yard sales, discount stores and occasionally big box stores (but almost always on clearance). Buying used or really cheap means I also do not feel too bad if some items don't get worn before they are outgrown. They are still in a condition that I could pass them on to a friend or donate to a charity.

For clothes:
I used Rubbermaid totes and labeled the size of the clothes inside. These stack neatly, are fairly watertight and heat tolerant (don't store things in the attic or outside that might melt or elastic that could become brittle).

For shoes:
Label the box with what size is inside. I always tried to have a pair of black dress shoes, white dress shoes, tennis shoes and sandals/flip flops in each box. No scrambling at last minute when someone's shoes do not fit and they need a bigger size (usually in the morning when we are getting dressed for church or to go on a field trip).