I think we can just throw the dressers in my house away.

It doesn’t matter which tactic I try with my kids, the clothes can’t seem to find their way into the drawers.  Unless, of course, I do the maid thing and wash, dry, fold, AND put it all away.

Everyone usually starts out with the couch syndrome.  At least I did.  You fold clothes in neat little piles all over the couch, and ask the kids to put their stacks away.  Inevitably, they are not all home at the same time, so you pile the leftovers from multiple kids into a laundry basket, where they may sit for, oh, say, two more weeks. 

The owners of said leftovers will never, I repeat, never volunteer to put their own clothes away.  Instead, they will return to said basket multiple times to access said clothes, thereby making a total mess of said leftovers.

Next, my laundry moved into the basket phase.  I bought enough baskets so there would be one for each kid, and I piled only their things in their basket.  The basket would make it to the rooms, but the clothes would still never make it into the drawers.

A week later, I would start getting complaints about how there were no clean clothes.  I would just reply that there weren’t any clean baskets, either.

Then I lived in a house with a big laundry room, and I put a set of shelves in the corner.  Each child had one shelf, and as I folded the clothes, I placed them on his or her shelf.  I knew I had made a mistake when I walked into the laundry room one morning and the whole family was in there getting dressed.  They thought that was easier than taking those extra twenty steps and carrying the clothes back to their rooms.

We’re back to the couch syndrome now.  I handed my daughter a bunch of clothes the other day and asked her to put them away.  I went into her room later and found them stacked neatly on the cedar chest at the foot of her bed.

I asked her, “Why didn’t you put the clothes away like I asked?”

“Why put them away,” she replied, “when these are all my favorite clothes and I’m just gonna be wearing them again soon?”

So, like I said, I think we need to just get rid of the dressers.  They just take up room.  Maybe have little bitty bedrooms and one HUGE laundry room with enough shelves for all the clothes we actually wear. 

I think it would save us all a lot of grief.