I’ve said it before – They grow so fast. Our kids are all growing and changing before our very eyes every single day. And, you know what this means? It means that they CONSTANTLY GROWING OUT OF THEIR CLOTHES.
I noticed it last week. Hayden decided to put on a pair of pants one crisp Fall morning (we live in California, yes, but it was honestly close to 40 degrees outside despite the warm afternoons we continue to have out here). I took one look at him when he came downstairs and literally laughed out loud. The cuff of his pants was seriously hitting the top of his ankle. He was flooding.
I knew that this likely wasn’t the only pair of pants in his dresser that fit him this way. In fact, I knew that he had shirts, pajamas, socks, sweatshirts, and jackets in his closet, all of which were too small for my now-seven-year-old. And he wasn’t the only one – Quinn, Brady, and Grace’s closets were all also in need of an overhaul. Should have seen it coming…
Grace and I could tackle her closet together, I was certain of that. But I just knew that my work in the boys’ room needed to be done in their absence. I took a deep breath, grabbed my large empty tupperware bins and some trash bags, and sucked it up while they were at school one day. Another one of my least favorite parenting duties – reorganizing clothes by size.
It’s not rocket science. I basically emptied out every.single.piece.of.clothing out of every drawer in each of the boys dressers, and put them all in the middle of the room in piles by category (short sleeved shirts, long sleeved shirts, shorts, pants, pajamas, dress shirts, etc), and went through each piece in each category, setting aside items that were too small. Brady and Hayden’s clothes went into a tupperware to save for Quinn, and Quinn’s in a pile to be given to his younger boy cousins. Every time I do this, I always come across several pieces of clothing that the kids outgrew before EVER WEARING IT. I usually find these shoved in the back of a drawer somewhere. Argh.
After sorting all of our clothes, I went through a few bags of hand-me-downs that some family and dear friends had so generously given us, organizing those also by size and fitting them into the piles that were already sorted by category. When everything was sorted, I put the piles away into the boys’ drawers.
It took forever. There were a LOT of piles, and a LOT of clothes, which we know we are so blessed to have. But man, keeping things sorted and organized in a way that the boys can then navigate takes a long time. And we all know how short-lived this organization will last… Between the boys just being messy and chaotic in general, and knowing that before I know it, they’ll have grown into the next size – there really is no end in sight.
Kids grow (out of their clothes) so fast.
