Although this question may be unrelated to Montessori, I thought it would be a good place to ask it. How many clothes should a child have? I am serious! I am the type of mom who wants my children to have well made clothes that look nice and are comfortable, but I think we are in over our heads. Between great garage sales, gifts from people, hand-me downs and what we buy I am thinking we have too much. I would love any ideas about how to decide what/how many clothes to keep…( Keep in mind that we have very different seasons as we live in Manitoba, Canada)
Hmm, I am on a role. I wonder if we just have too much of everything in our house.
I would love your comments, tip or advice. Thank-you!
Tree House Preschool Daycare
Saturday 11th of July 2009
I used to struggle with having too many clothes too...now we have 2 sets, summer and the rest of the year. We are in northern Ontario so we have long cold winters. I keep 12 outfits in my daughters drawers. I put a bottom with a matching top together. She had 3 outfits in each of her 4 drawers to choose from each day. I keep her Sunday clothes, going to town clothes hanging in the closet, and a party dress in her closest. I do have a few extra things on top of her closest for weeks when the wash is behind or she has gone through several outfits quickly. Her dresser also has a drawer for underware (I keep 2 extra t-shirts in there in winter) and a pajama drawer. We too buy most of her clothes at thrift stores and garage sales. It is very hard to pass up a bargain but I have been down the "too many clothes" route with our younger children and it is too hard for them to manage their clothes.
AndieF
Thursday 9th of July 2009
I live in Illinois, and we have 4 distinct seasons. I have 3 children, 2 girls and then one boy (ages 9,7,and 4.) What I've done is go with 7s. So each of the children have 7 underwear, 7 socks, 7 short sleeve t-shirts, 7 nicer shirts, 7 skirts/dresses. (I don't tend to have 7 dress pants for my son. Closer to 4 or 5 usually.) and 7 bottoms. I do the one tub thing for storing out of season clothes, and one tub for next size up clothes.
My Boys' Teacher
Wednesday 8th of July 2009
LOL! I know what you mean. My boys wear ALL hand-me-downs. The hand-me-downs come not only from my nephew but also from my best friend who had TWINS. Twins=two of everything. Also, my SIL didn't do laundry very often and so compensated by having A LOT of everything. I counted at one point and Kal-El had 27 pairs of pants from them in the 18-24 months size, definitely overkill.
Someone more frugal than myself may have better advice for you with smaller numbers. However, I did come up with a way of setting a "limit." I store the boys' clothes in 18 gallon Sterilite/Rubbermaid tubs. I allow ONE 18 gallon bin for each size UNDER 2T. Once they hit 2T I allowed myself one tub for warm-weather clothes and one tub for cold-weather clothes. For us this was the right amount of clothes, not too much, not too few. I've noticed I like having A LOT of shorts and jeans in Spring, Summer and Fall because they always need to be changed after being outside (boys...). At any rate, when I can't get the lid on a bin I go through and start throwing things in the charity box.
Another reason I like the bins is that I always keep the empty bin from the size that is currently hanging in the closet on the floor of the closet. When I put something on the boys and it is too small I throw it in the bin so I don't keep trying it repeatedly for weeks. When I put a new size in the closet I keep the old size nested inside the empty bin for the current size for a couple of weeks. I do this for a couple of reasons. One reason is that clothing in the old size seems to keep popping up for a week or two as it goes through the laundry and it's convenient to wait before I take the old size to the basement so everything is in there. The second reason is that if I put something from the new size on one of the boys and it is already too small it really should be stored with the old size rather than the new size and I eventually get the things that run small in the correct bin.