Socks, Solved!

We have a family of six. And our family of six produces a lot of laundry...a lot of it. And a large portion of our laundry consists of white socks. Over the years I have come to despise white socks, more specifically, white children's socks!

We have a sock basket that is always over flowing with white unmatched socks. After every load of laundry (at least two a day in our house) we put the clean socks in the sock basket to wait to be matched up.

Usually once a week I sit down and begin the tedious chore of matching socks. After about an hour of sitting on the floor surrounded by white socks I give up--only having half of the socks matched. The kids' feet are growing to about the same size so all of the socks look similar and we're pretty much going by memory when deciding which socks go to which child.

We have tried various methods for making this process easier. We've given each kid one specific style of sock--that made finding the matches easier but we still had to find the matches. We tried writing initials on the feet of the socks--still had to find the matches. We tried naming wash days for each kid--that created problems in making full loads and just threw off my laundry washing altogether.

It wasn't until about a month ago when we thought to get each kid a mesh sock bag. We already had one we used to store Aly's little socks so we thought we'd just expand on the idea. They keep these bags on top of their dressers. At the end of each day when they take their socks off they go into the bag. Then on Sunday they bring their full bags to the laundry room where I throw them in the wash. Once they've gone through the dryer I hand the bags, still full, back to the kids and they fold and put away their own socks!

I am not sure why it took me so long to come up with this. It's not like it's some insanely brilliant idea. None the less, I'm spending less and less time matching socks and our sock basket, MIA socks aside, is nearly empty! Not to mention having all the socks in one place make it a tiny bit easier for the kids to do the laundry!

Yep, it's the little things in life...

Socks, Solved!