Clothing Cull

I've mentioned The Mountains before.  

My dining room and kitchen are covered in mountains of clean washing.  Crapslides (like landslides, but tis the piles of crap) are a life threatening event.

This weekend I combined moping (the hairy one went away) and caffeine.  For those of you unaware of the equation:

MOPING + CAFFEINE = PRODUCTIVITY

So, in frustration at the constant mountains and never being able to find the clothes I want for the children... I decided on a clothing cull.

Clothing culls have steps.

First - go through the mountains (this involves careful mountain relocation programmes) and remove all clothing that children have grown out of (mine will squeeze into much loved tops, and have pjs that finish by their knees for as long as I will let them) and put into bags.  All clothes are recycled to friends, so B clothes go in one bag to be passed to Beau and Trinity, and the other two go in a bag together because I have friends with matching genders to pass on to, or people who are happy to split the bag up and pass on to the other gender.

Second - Pick a child (I went with the Dude first as he is the hardest) and pull out all of their clothes from the mountains (again, more relocating happens).  Also grab any of their clothes actually in their rooms.

Third - Divide the clothes into types (tops, pjs etc)

Fourth - Go through each type and decide roughly how many they actually NEED to have and keep the ones you like (do NOT let children help with this task - it turns into the classic "TEDDY!!!" moment like when they find a toy they have barely glanced at in 3 years, but desperate love and need when it is being thrown out).  I am not totally heartless - I do keep the tops that they adore even if I hate them.

Fifth - Put away greatly reduced pile of clothes

Sixth - Bag up the remaining clothes to send to Daddy's house (we've spent the past 2 years shuffling clothes back and forth every weekend - sending the stack of clothes to live there makes sense).

Repeat steps 2-6 for each child.

My children have an obscene amount of clothes it turns out.  Not bought by me I should add!  In the same way that I have the bag for Beau etc, I have bags passed to me from several different people.

The boy child had 26 pj tops?!!?  And that isn't including any that are probably still lurking in beds or waiting to be washed.  Plus - he tends to sleep naked!!!

Strawb had 12 cardigans, and she is my least passed down to child!!!

Dude loves it.  He got up and got himself dressed this morning because his clothes were easy to find.  He's not queried where they have gone, he's fairly used to me doing it to be fair.

Strawb however realised what was happening as I was sorting through her stuff.

She came running over, gathered up armfuls of clothes screaming "No!!!  Mine favourite!!!!" and went and sat in a little heap of rescued clothes.

I am Good and Kind Mummy.  I let her keep everything she had rescued.

The fact that she was rescuing everything that was staying anyway as she had missed Stage 4 and I was on Stage 5 has nothing to do with it.  (annoyingly I didn't get a photo...)

Let's try this again shall we?

Sorry, my brain was utterly against blogging for a few weeks.  It's annoying as I had birthday and stuff to blog about but it has completely escaped me.

Potty Training!

We've attempted this half heartedly a few times now (generally with both of us deciding it is too much effort to continue).  Saturday though, the small child was anti-nappies, we were in for the day, so I decided to let her get on with it... and she had no accidents!?!?!

Sunday we went with the nappies as we were going back and forth in the car lots.

Monday was bare bum at home, nappy out.

Yesterday though, we went for it and put on knickers.  Always the fun part.

Everyone has different methods for potty training.  With B we went with pull ups, found that she was lazy if she had them on, so gave up and had bare bum for a few days, and then putting knickers on and pretty much start from scratch whilst she worked out that knickers don't work the same way as pull ups.  Oh, and refuse point blank to use the potty for anything other than wee - that took producing a baby to sort (don't ask me how, but the child who would scream and hold it in until she had a night nappy on came to see her new baby brother, announced she needed to poo, sat on the potty and was fine ever since).

Dude, I did nothing.  He decided he was done with nappies and just did it.  I approve of this method.

Strawb, I have gone with a similar style to B.  Dresses, so no fiddling pulling stuff down, bare bum to begin with so that the "I must go NOW!" is easy, and now getting used to having knickers in the way.

So, anyway - yesterday we bit the bullet and went for knickers.  With the exception of the very first wee, she did it!  No accidents!

Not entirely sure how today is going to be, as we are going out and she is going to be more distracted, but she is ready this time, and I don't want to mess about and miss the opportunity.

(not the most exciting of posts for my return, I accept that, but what needed to be written about right now.  So there.)