As a Mom of a 3 1/2 year old girl and a newborn boy, it is an understatement to say that I do a lot of laundry. On average, there is one load done per day in our house.

I have become a laundry expert as far as I am concerned.

Do you constantly have laundry piled up in your house?  Do you have a hard time staying on top of your laundry?  Do you forget about stains and wash the items without pre-treating them?

Here are some tips in order to make laundry easier:

Here are some Earth-friendly ways to do laundry as well.

I hope that these tips help you keep your laundry situation organized and more under control!
I’d love to hear some more tips in your comments.

It’s common in some circles to pass along clothing that your children have outgrown. We’ve gotten and passed along a lot of clothing over the years and it’s helped our budget considerably. I’m sure that the clothes we’ve passed on have helped other families too. When someone offers you their child’s outgrown clothing to use, it’s always a good idea to clarify what they mean by “use”.

I just assumed that the rules were the same for everyone: you get a bag of clothing, use what you can and pass the rest along. Once your child outgrows the clothing, you take what is still in useable condition and pass it along again. I assumed too that all moms would understand that some outfits would get very worn, ripped or stained and that they would need to be discarded. I learned that my assumptions were not correct all the time.

When I was a single mom, I had lots of offers of help. Several people from church had offered to let me “borrow” their children’s outgrown clothing. I didn’t really fixate on the borrow word—I was struggling financially and I was glad for the clothes. Turns out it was an important thing to consider. Borrowing clothes means that the person giving you the clothing expects you to return the clothes to them when your child is done with them. It sounds easy enough, but the real world is very rarely easy.

I had several women offer to let me borrow clothing that particular year. I took them all up on their offers. However, none of them wanted the clothing marked and when my daughter outgrew the clothes, I had trouble remembering who had allowed me to borrow what piece of clothing. There were some pieces that were stained permanently and I wasn’t able to get the stains out.

One of the moms was very upset when she saw that her daughter’s favorite shirt which she wanted back now had a juice stain on the collar. Because of this experience, I found that I was following the children around making sure they didn’t get dirty. I was obsessing over stains and dirt too! I was also worrying about keeping the different borrowed clothes separate to not confuse who gave me what. I didn’t do such a great job despite my efforts either.

After a particularly stressful day, I decided that the free borrowed clothes were costing me too much in emotional energy. I returned them to their owners and thanked them for their kindness. After that, I declined offers to “borrow” clothing for free: the free clothes just “cost” me too much! I would have been better off just buying second hand clothes.

I’m feeling super smug today. I’ve cloth diapered my son since he was six months old, when I bought a set of FuzziBunz diapers in size medium. He’s two and a half and those diapers still fit him. For that $200 investment, I’ve saved over $500 in disposable diapers in two years. And since I live in an apartment where the laundry is paid for, you can make that feeling extra super-smug!

It helps that he’s slim and didn’t need a bigger size of cloth diapers, which would have added to the expense. Moms who use one-size-fits all diapers, like BumGenius diapers, which fit babies from newborns up to toddlers, can also save money on buying diapers.

Once my son is potty trained, which I currently predict will be when they send Britney Spears to the moon, I can sell the diapers on Diaperswappers.com or craigslist, where they have a great resale value.

Cloth diapers aren’t for everyone, but they’ve been a great choice for us. It helps a lot that I love doing laundry (yeah, i know I’m a freak), they are probably better for the environment, and they have lots of little benefits, like cushioning learning-to-walk bottoms better, and looking cuter than disposable diapers too.

I’ll close with a cute story… My son loves our neighborhood fire station. One of the times we were there, a firefighter dad-to-be asked if my son wore Pampers or Huggies. I use cloth, I told him. The other firefighters standing around chimed in with their opinions on different diaper brands and I can’t imagine a more surreal conversation than a bunch of burly firefighters with axes slung over their shoulders, chatting about diaper pins.