The Chatelaine's Keys

admin August 15th, 2011

As some of you may have heard, we got a call last week about (possibly) taking a group of five siblings - or possibly three or four of them.  It is not entirely clear that they will all come into care, or that we would be asked to take all or any of them.  It is also possible we would decline - five is more than we bargained for, the group is very, very young (ages 5 to newborn) and we don’t have enough information about them yet to make a decision. We probably won’t get that information until the county makes its decisions about what they will do, so we wait.

Still, the thought of going from four children to seven, eight or even nine has me curious about the logistics - how will all of this work for us?  Technically, I have a large family - in the US large families start at 3 or 4 kids.  I still remember, shortly after Isaiah (third child) was born, I went to a tea party held by a good friend for a group of women who had all had babies recently.  All of us had our second or third, and one woman, on her second, said to me “Well, you have all those children!”  I blinked, because it had never occurred to me that a family of three constituted “all those” but in fact it does.

Indeed, when I recently attended an event to receive an award in New York City, I was as much a curiosity as a three-headed bear because I was a professional writer of some minor note *with four children.*  In New York, where outside some ethnic and religious populations, one or two children is an absolute maximum, I found myself surrounded by women stunned that anyone could have multiple children and write books as well.  Everyone asked “how does she do it” as though accomplishment plus children were impossible - and perhaps it is if women have to do all the domestic work alone. I’m fortunate in that it is a shared project in our household.

But if mine is a technically large family (four kids, two adults, sometimes additional adults, as when Eric’s grandparents lived with us or our housemate Phil did), the shift from four to seven, eight or nine (probably in a matter of days)  is a pretty big one in this culture.  Ok, not just the culture - in our lives as well, and yes, I’m freaking out a little .   Besides that, however, there’s public perception too, however.  Despite the tv-show prominence of a few large families, most households in the US are 2.7 people - ours would be 11 if we took all five kids.

If four children is already a big family, what the heck is eight or nine kids?  As Melissa Fay Greene writes (she’s the bio and adoptive Mom of 9) in _No Biking in the House Without a Helmet_, that many kids marks you as weird and makes people put you in “…among the greats:  the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers and perhaps even Mrs. Vassilyev, who, according to the Guiness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth century Russia.”  Now there’s a company I never thought to join.

Besides the fascination with sheer numbers,  everyone who writes and reads about large families is fascinated by the logistics - how many gallons of milk a week, how do they do the shopping, how much laundry and how many dishes?  I admit, I’m no different - I want to be able to envision how this all works, to try and have a set of strategies in my head that might make the transition doable if this - or some other - group of siblings joins my extant herd of boys.

So I googled - a bunch - about larger family logistics, and how do people do it.  Unfortunately, a lot of what I found didn’t really apply to us, in the same sense that a lot of standard american cultural assumptions don’t apply to us.  The advice offered to large families is centered on families that don’t seem terribly worried about their ecological impact.  Maybe they can’t worry about it, or maybe it isn’t part of their consciousness.

Whatever the reason, advice for parents of large families (ok, let’s actually admit it is almost always mothers of large families!) tends to emphasize big appliances at lots of them.  Get three fridges one family suggests - one just for the milk!  Two industrial washers and two matching industrial dryers as well - that’ll keep the laundry under control!  Use paper and plastic at every meal to minimize dishes!  Color code everything  - every kid gets a color, and everything they own - socks, underpants, towels, backpacks…it all comes in purple or green or puce (for the truly mega-families, what happens if you are the last kid and your color choices are puce and ashes-of-roses ).

I’m not sitting in judgement here - many of these families, particularly the large adoptive families with many kids with special needs, may simply not be able to add on energy reduction.  Indeed, for the families that keep large sibling groups from separation, or take in hard-to-place older and disabled kids, just giving the kids a family will probably reduce their energy and resource consumption considerably by reducing visitations, consolidating kids into one home instead of four, etc…, not to mention the other deep goods - the fact that kids get families.  My point isn’t that other families should do differently, but that it was hard to find role models, except by digging into the past.

I don’t have a working refrigerator - we use a small fridge as an icebox.  It is a side-by-side (inherited from Eric’s grandmother), so I might open up the other side, but I won’t be buying a plug-in model.  I will be buying milk when the kids come, because I’m not legally permitted to feed foster children our goat’s milk, but I don’t see myself with an infinite number of gallons of industrial milk in a fridge, as so many blog pictures show.

While when our present front loader washer meets its inevitable end, I do anticipate replacing it with a commercial model, that probably won’t be for quite a while -  who knows about things that far away?  My mother asked me recently if I would need to get a dryer to keep up with the laundry - my assumption is no, since generations of women raised large families without them, but I haven’t done the laundry for more than 7 people yet (although at one point I was doing laundry for a baby, a toddler and an autistic, non-toilet trained five years old, as we as an incontinent elder, plus others so I’ve got a faint sense of this).  The plastic and paper are not part of my plan, and where would I find that much color-matching stuff in my usual shopping haunts, Goodwill. Savers and various yard sales?  Besides, who wants to wear purple every day?

Some of the advice for large families is good - make lists, get organized, get rid of stuff you don’t need.  Organize the kids into buddies, with a bigger kid keeping an eye on a younger one.  Cook double and freeze.  Chore charts, calendars - all good advice.  Most of it is good advice for those of us with small-big families too, which is why a lot of it is already in place, and I have some doubts about my ability to do some of the other stuff.

Some things we are already doing - bulk purchasing, a large pantry, buying clothes for larger sizes in advance - I’ve just added girl things into the mix and am starting to accumulate a stash of clothing for potential daughters, if any. The kids already have chores.  I already have multiple calendars.  I’m just now sure how much new will be required of me as I scale up.

Then there’s the old-fashioned advice - wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, etc…  But I don’t iron, and I have to do laundry just about every day as it is - much of the year the limiting factor is drying space, so a “day” to wash is out.  I can imagine modifying it - preserve on Monday, bake on Tuesday, weed on Wednesday, mend on Thursday - but I haven’t quite pulled it together yet in my head, and I’m not clear that baking on Tuesday, rather than when we’re low on bread, will actually have me any time.

So those of you with large households, particularly trying to Riot or keep your energy use down in other ways, what do you do?  What’s the best advice anyone has ever given you for managing a large household?   How do you organize yourself? Keep up with the clothing and the washing, the cooking and shopping?  Do you use a full range of appliances?  Do without?  What’s worth having and what isn’t?  I want your advice!

Sharon

• adoption , housewifely virtues
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Sharon June 27th, 2011

Russell Arben Fox has a completely fascinating essay about bringing Shannon Hayes’ work on radical homemaking to a Mormon women’s group.  He writes:

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of putting together a panel discussion (at this conference, with the wonderful people you see on the left) which took off, in many different directions, from Hayes’s insistence upon thinking seriously about just what “making” a simple, sustainable, spiritually-edifying “home” truly consisted of. What I wanted to do was plant some seeds of discussion (seeds which grow in surprising directions in Hayes’s book), presenting the “home” as something other than a unit of consumption, other than a place where individuals rest their heads and eat their meals and watch their television shows, all of which require ever-increasing (and often debt-driven) economic participation to keep going. In preparation for that, I asked a Mormon audience exactly what kind of “homemaking” and “enrichment” activities their local congregations still participate in, if any. The answers were, to say the least, revealing. And they should be-for some decades, extending for many years out beyond Mormonism’s 19th-century pioneer period, the ability to live frugally, to share resources and skills with family and friends so as to become self-sustaining, to basically dissent from the pursuit of wealth and growth, was an unstated principle of a great deal that Relief Society did. Enriching the home meant making it more tendable, more nuturable, more amenable to (one might say more “organic to”, but such language is unfortunately foreign to most American Mormons, whether in the 19th century or today) the work and production and play of those who live there, rather than more dependent upon the size of the paycheck brought home and the caprice of the market in general. That distant ideal remains a half-life existence throughout much of Mormon culture (and not just Mormons-Laura McKenna, who confessed herself highly attracted to much of Hayes’s call, has made clear her own disposition to the “pioneer virtues” of “making do or doing without” before as well).

Part of this story, of course, can’t be told without talking about Mormonism’s ultimately mostly abandoned effort to develop a truly alternative-more communitarian, more egalitarian, more localized-culture and economy in Utah. This is part of why I’d love to see Hayes’s book be the centerpiece of a Relief Society lesson: because in the mostly conservative, mostly middle- and upper-class white American Mormon church, Hayes’s righteous attacks on capitalism as an economic system which drives us to debt and competition, invades the sanctity of the home which consumer values and fears, and commodifies and individualizes our most intimate and emotionally connective choices…well, it might not go over too well. But then again, if it was stated by way of quoting 19th-century church leaders and passages of scripture which make essentially the same point, maybe some real enrichment could be possible.

What struck me as fascinating about Fox’s analysis is that it reveals the deep compatibility - and underlying anti-capitalist sentiment that structure what are often seen as antithetical parts of the political spectrum.  Now this is not news in a way.  Anyone who has joined a homesteading list, or attempted to study self-sufficiency skills, particularly traditionally female domestic skills like preserving food, fiber arts, and other domestic labor has probably noticed the confluence of hippies in peasant skirts with conservative Christian women in modest dress, anarchist women in black and orthodox Jewish women in long denim skirts, Republican farmwives from Montana and left-leaning urban farmers from New York City or Chicago, older women from churches in their crowns who kept the skills alive and young women trying to grasp them and learn.

The internet makes these comings together more possible, of course, but they aren’t the whole of the thing.  My neighborhood knitting group (which admittedly I rarely have time to attend) runs the political and religious spectrum, and ranges in age from an 11 year old working on her first scarf to a 55 year old also on her first scarf (her grandmother tried to teach her) to a recent immigrant in her 20s from east Africa on her first scarf (her first winter in upstate New York made evident the benefits of knitting)  to a host of experienced knitters ranging from 14 (we have two extraordinarily experienced and gifted young teenage knitters - one the daughter of a conservative Christian family who has been knitting since she was 7, the other the daughter of leftist Waldorf devotees knitting since she was 5 - both of them are best friends, and both  help me with complicated cables and knit about as easily as they breathe) to 92 and able to claim that she has knitted more than 500 sweaters in her lifetime!

The affirmation of the domestic sphere, of the informal economy and of women’s work is itself a radical act in a culture that assumes that one should purchase all goods and services once provided by the informal economy.  Any of you who have read _Depletion and Abundance_ will know that I consider the dismantling of the informal economy (which is the larger portion of the world economy, represent 3/4 of total economic activity) in the developed world and the undermining of the Global South’s informal economy to be a disaster in the making, as we run out of the fuel (and the ability to safely burn it, if such a thing can ever be said to have existed) that permitted this.

Fox’s article, with its exploration of the different ways that different communities speak of this loss, the different languages that add up to the same thing - a recognition that the privatization of the domestic sphere has undermined our basic safety.  Whether you speak in terms of conserving the past, of spiritual arguments of many kinds or in terms of peak oil and climate change, there is something fundamentally radical about every attempt to reclaim the home as a site of productivity, a place where economic security is created, rather than a sink for resources.

It is hard to overstate how radical this is - consider, for example, the economic implications for housing of a culture that values the land that houses are built on for their potential economic productivity.  Consider the danger to a consumer economy of a culture of making do and making it yourself - 70% of our economy is consumer activity.  The affirmation of the home as the center of things, as a site of complex resistance to the totalizing formal economy’s attempts to claim all of us is truly radical - and it is being affirmed on right and left, by Mormons and Pagans, by atheists and the orthodox of many stripes, by feminists and by traditionalists.

The transformation of the home into a site of production, redistribution and community is a threat to a totalizing formal economy that claims it needs all of everyone’s productivity all the time.  It is a threat to a model that says that neither men nor women can be released to stay home with a sick child or an elderly parent (yes, nominally you can, but only if you can afford it), to nurse a baby or even be there to cook dinner.  Both adults must be working at all times to increase productivity.  All children must be being trained at all times for future productivity.  The formal economy has claimed us, devoured the time we once spent on other things, and claimed our future as well.

The problem, as we have seen in the last few years is that the formal economy is very vulnerable - it depends on things that no one really controls.  Historically speaking as peasant economist Teodor Shanin and other economic historians have documented, in times when the formal economy fails, the informal economy - made up of domestic work, untaxed barter, volunteerism, family exchanges of resources and even the criminal economy - rises up to keep people fed.  It was the informal economy that in Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union averted starvation - even though conventional economic models argued people should be starving.

What Transition calls “reskilling” - what other people call by other names, including Christian homemaking and radical homemaking, and “doing it like Grandma used to” is actually the reinvention of the most important resource we may have for our future - the restoration of the informal economy.  It is a hugely political and hugely important act, being done by multiple ends of the political spectrum at once, and this matters.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t real and significant differences between how this is framed and established that matter a lot.  They matter to me personally obviously (for example that gay families not get short shrift and that women have the right to control their bodies) and they matter politically.  It isn’t the case that the Quiverfull Moms and the anarchists Moms are always going to agree - or that there aren’t some deep issues to be worked out if there is common ground to be found.

At the same time, given the critical importance of reinventing the damaged informal economy, this work is worth doing - moreover it already going on among people on each end of the political spectrum, through the middle and by people who could care less about politics but just want healthy food, a garden and a nice warm quilt to sleep under.  The very fact that this work is being done across the spectrum suggests that it is a site for organizing and work that could be expanded upon, grown and produce fruit - not easily or without considerable work, but then nothing really worth having ever comes but with that hard labor.

Sharon

• anti-modernism , housewifely virtues , politics
• Comments(16)

Sharon July 2nd, 2009

When I was a girl, my grandmother once tried to explain to me why she kept trying to teach me to knit and crochet.  My grandmother was old fashioned, and felt that her three granddaughters ought to act like young ladies, and get something of the education young ladies might have.  We, on the other hand, were products of our age, and saw her attempt to inculcate womanly skills and virtues as an attempt to constrain us, to impose standards that no longer applied from the past upon the present.

My grandmother told me that when I was a grown woman, I would live my life in a sea of labor that was done each morning, and undone before I went to bed.  I would wash the dishes and cook meals, only to see them eaten and the dishes dirtied again. I would wash clothes, dry them, and see them back in the hamper.  She observed to me that it was necessary that I learn to do something that “stayed done at the end of the day.”  She was telling me how important this was to her, and she wanted very much to pass on the knowledge.

I was 10 or so, and I truly did not understand what she was saying to me.  The life she portrayed seemed alien, distant and unimaginable.  Of course I would end each day with some great accomplishment.  Of course my work would stay done.  I wasn’t going to be concerning myself with dishes and laundry (I think I thought magic fairies might do these for me), but with great events and great deeds - dishes didn’t figure into it.  So why on earth did I need to know how to knit or crochet? How could such small things ever matter?  I would never, I thought, be the sort of woman who needs, at the end of the day, to rest quietly and work on that one thing that will not be undone.  I assumed that my grandmother was simply being fusty/

I remember that talk with chagrin and sorrow every time I think of it - even though being an idiot is the official province of 10 year olds.  I’m embarrassed to admit how many years it took me to understand that my Grandmother wasn’t trying to force me into an arcane version of womanhood - she was trying to prepare me for the daily reality of parenthood, of home ownership, of domestic life.  Now I know.  She knew that my airy assumption that “something would be done” about the problem of domestic labor was unlikely, and she was doing what she could to get me ready.  And I didn’t listen. 

Many, many years later, as I learned, slowly, painfully to knit from books and with the help of friends, I wished desperately that I’d paid attention to my grandmother, wished that I hadn’t thought I’d known so much.  She’s gone now, and my son Isaiah’s middle name memorializes her. I wish she could hear my apologies from here.  I know she forgave me long ago, but I wish I’d understood more, sooner.

In my first post on this subject, I made the case for what I see as the deep value of domestic labor.  Now despite the title of thread, it should be noted that I do not believe this is or should be “women’s work” - that is, by “housewifery” I mean work, which like “husbandry” is associated with the basic maintenence of a self-sufficient homestead - whether in an city apartment or a rural dwelling.  The two terms are historically gendered, but they need not be in the present.  In the comments on my last post, we came up with the term “hussy” - now usually associated with the term “shameless” but once merely a short term for a housewife of any kind.  My suggestion is that handwork, along with all the other subjects in this category ought to be the territory of both shameless (for what on earth have we to be ashamed of?) hussies and hubbies .

Much domestic work for hussies and hubbies is of the sort called ”reproductive labor” by scholars that has to be done over and over again. Whether indoors, where the floors are cleaned and then mud tracked upon them again, or outdoors, where the sheep are moved to new pasture, and then must be moved tomorrow, it is always there.  The children’s water glasses must be filled, the chicken’s waterer’s must be filled, and all must be done day in and day out, round and around the year, and interspersed with big, often exhausting jobs.  All of us, then, need a moment in each day when we do something that gets us, as the poet says, “forwarder.”  Sometimes that will be the big job  - the hay brought back from the field, the new garden bed built, the jars of corn relish lined up.  But most days, there won’t have been a big job to mark the day - just an endless line of little ones, most undone again nearly as soon as they are complete.  And thus the virtue of handwork, the small thing that gets you a little bit further along on something needful - a sweater, a quilt, a tool, a toy.

Why handwork?  What does that even mean?  Well, by “handwork” here, I mean not just any work done by hand, but the kind of work that can be done by hand quietly and safely around others, while engaged in conversation, singing, learning, listening, even prayer. It is the work of quiet times, things that can often be done in lower-light conditions, with small, portable equipment at evening, when the day’s other chores are complete.  Handwork of this sort marks a kind of transition between work and rest, chores and play - often pleasurable activities, with artistry embedded in them, we do them for both beauty and utility, for both work and play, and thus they bridge the margins of each category. 

Often it is the last thing we do, when it feels so good to sit.  Or perhaps they are a way of making a day filled with classes or talks, long drives or even a favorite movie into time where something is also addeed to the well being of one’s family or the beauty of one’s home.

What activities fall in this category?  My own favorite category of handwork is knitting, but among fiber arts it would include spindle spinning (wheel spinning is sometimes possible in these conditions but requires more equipment than most of the others), needle felting, crochet, rug braiding, tatting, light mending, darning, piecing quilts, carding, embroidery, white work and other fabric and fiber crafts.  Many fiber crafts are easily adaptable to these conditions - while it might not always be possible to do, say the finest embroidery in low light conditions, or elaborate fair isle knitting patterns, in many cases is may be possible to sew a straight seam or knit a familiar pattern mostly by touch.  If the craft can be done by the blind, you probably could learn to do it too.

But while things involving a needle or pair of needles and some cloth are easily portable and make up a chunk of handwork, these are not the only possibilities.  Whittling or the carving of small objects like spoons and toys are excellent handwork.  Oiling or maintaining or even light file sharpening of small tools can be done as handwork.  There are certainly categories of handwork that I am not immediately calling to mind.  The general requirements are that they cannot require daylight precision, they must not be so loud that they preclude conversation, listening to music or to someone reading aloud.  They must not be physically arduous, since people are tired at the end of the day.  It must be work that can be picked up and put down again. The work should be relaxing, repetetive, soothing - enough so that the moving hands add to the pleasure of putting one’s feet up.

Handwork is not and should not be a gendered province - all of us have time when we must sit and listen, or time when we want to converse.  As times get more stressful, we may find that we have more of this time, not less - for all that we have more work to do when we must make do with less money and energy, we also often have more of this time.  That is, unemployment, a more seasonal life, less television, fewer nights out and fewer long car trips may mean more reasons to sit, and be quiet together.  If the power does go out, or get too expensive, handwork makes the evening hours productive, artistic, graceful - and the movement of fingers enables conversation.

I think there is more of a prejudice among men against fiber arts than there is among women against carving or mending tools.  This is a great pity, because most fiber arts were historically at least partly the province of men.  Young Scottish boys sent out to mind the flock were set to knitting their own stockings.  The knitting guilds were male only in many cases.  The same is true of many textile works - and while there are some great resources out there for knitting and sewing men, I think there’s an instinctive “is that really a guy thing?” among many gents.  It should be.  I don’t know if it helps to offer a role model, but my 6’2, bearded, father-of-many, scythe-wielding, physicist-farmer husband knits rather gracefully. and while he can’t sew by hand to save his life, is better with a sewing machine and pattern than I am. Just as my readers often feel free to blame me for the crazy ideas they pick up here I officially give you permission (note, I have yet to clear this with Eric, but hey, it is easier to get forgiveness… ) to blame it on Eric’s role modelling .

I do my handwork in the car, on long drives, I do it with my feet up across my husband’s lap, or his across mine. We knit together, offering commentary on each other’s projects. I do it when I attend conferences or talks, and when we have guests and I want to hear what they have been doing.  I do it while Simon reads stories aloud to his brothers and to us, or while Eric plays the piano or we all sing.  I tend to make small things - I sew on buttons or mend the children’s pants, or knit hats and mittens for the winter, or a pair of socks for gift.  I brush out the angora from the bunnies and spin it while we watch a movie, or make clumsy attempts at woodworking.  All of these skills took time for me to be able to do them without concentration, while also doing other things - I still can’t carve worth a damn, and it takes more of my attention than I like.  But I remember when I could not knit or sew without my eyes on the needles, and now my fingers have eyes on their tips, at least for those activities.  It took only time and practice.

And each one gets me “forwarder” - even if a whole item is not produced, a dozen rows on a sock or crocheted kippah, a few inches of braiding on a denim rug, two items off the mending pile or the pile of tools to be sharpened and oiled gets me ahead.   Each useful item, each mended thing, gets me forwarder as well - one more thing I do not have to buy, one more year of use, one less broken tool.  It is a small thing in a life full of jobs that wash over me day by day, done and undone, done and undone again, but the rhythym of knitting needles clicking, of needle against thimble, of knife against wood while music or words flow over me is a step, a stitch, a cut in that repetition, a thing that is complete and whole.  It ties me back to my grandmother, a silent apology for what I did not know then but do now, and pushes me forward, to the culmination of good and productive work, and the quiet at the end of the day.

Sharon

• housewifely virtues
• Comments(51)

Sharon May 5th, 2009

I must thank a particular reader, who I will leave anonymous, for this series.  I got an email from a reader praising my work very kindly and in terms of great enthusiasm, and stating that she felt that various famous national magazines should be carrying my work.  This was all very flattering, until she got to the main point of her letter, which was to offer me constructive criticism about my “obsession with the housewifely virtues crap.”  She asked that I stop “wasting myself” writing about food storage and preservation, cooking and parenting  and write more of the “public intellectual” pieces that she so admires.  She cited several examples, and hoped that I’d take the message in the spirit in which it was intended, because, after all, it was for my own good.

I actually rather think I did take it as intended .  And I took it precisely as I take the largish number of emails I get from people who think I should stop trying to write policy, theoretical or intellectual pieces that were “too long” and “boring” and just concentrate on giving people practical advice that they can use, while leaving the big issues to the grownups - that is, I laughed.  And being contrary, I went off to write precisely the sort of piece my correspondent hates.  So I thank her for the inspiration.

The thing is, I am a housewife.  I like to think I’m a bit of an intellectual, but much of my day to day life is that of mistress of the house - co leader with my husband (whose title also implies binding to the home) of a household.  This is  true regardless of whether I work professionally or only in the domestic sphere - I believe that holding house, with all its connotations of making a comfortable place to live, thift and all that other stuff is good and important work, which I have to do no matter what else I do.  Yeah, I write, but I also do laundry.  IMHO, the idea that these things are fundamentally split - that the life of the mind happens at the computer, maybe in the garden, but never, ever, while folding clothes, seems wrong, and kind of demeaning to all of us, male or female, who would rather not have the laundry piled up on the floor. 

I think the choice not to find domestic life interesting is, in fact a choice.  That is, I don’t find that laundry or dishes are inherently less interesting than, say, the annual business report - we have decided they are, but because we have done so, there’s probably actually much more to be said about how to do the dishes quickly and well, or how to manage laundry well than has been.  The reality is that these things matter - they take up our time and energy and money, and the flow of those things - resources, time, personal and fossil energies, are important.  I keep waiting for permaculturists to start writing books about domestic management, because I think this is territory insufficiently explored and of a great deal of use.  Until they do, I’ll put it on my agenda.

So I thought I’d write about the problem of clothing management, which I must admit is one of the banes of my existence.  For a couple of adults with no children, this may seem like a minor task, although I hope I may have someting to offer even then.  But since I live in a house with four growing kids, a very limited clothing budget, no time to shop and not much inclination to do so, I’ve had to get fairly good at all of this, despite my inherent lack of organization.

I do all the laundry, and all the clothing management in our household - we share the domestic work fairly evenly, but I like doing laundry and Eric doesn’t, and he does floors in trade.  I also purchase all the clothing, almost all from yard sales and thrift shops - the only things I consistently buy new are pajamas for my oldest son, because footed fleece pjs (part of our “staying warm in a cool house” plan) in size 14 are hard to come by (although once in a while I manage to snag even these).  I also do all the mending, because I don’t like having to rip it out, and Eric is constitutionally incapable of not sewing the pants together or something.

Because sometimes the pickings in a particular size are abundant and sometimes not, I buy clothing three sizes ahead of my current maximum.  At the moment, my youngest son is wearing size 4T, and Eli is wearing size 12, and I have yet to pass on the 2T and 3T clothes, so I have clothing in sizes ranging from 2T to size 18, as well as a small stash of baby clothes that I have held onto for sentimental reason.  This is a lot of clothes.  I keep a list of current sizes (I can then pass this list on to friends and family who will keep an eye out for me), and the sizes I am looking for (which also include clothes for my nieces and some friends’ kids) - thus, I can immediately find out whether I need a pair of size six snowpants or not.

In addition, I have two kids using diapers at least part of the time, and my family lives on a farm, so I do *a lot* of laundry, folding, mending and putting away.  Because my annual budget for clothing is quite small (we clothe the kids on less than $300 per year for all four of them - many years much, much less), I need to keep the clothes in good order, and be reasonably careful about management.  I admit, this is not my favorite chore - but it is important because it saves us a *lot* of money, and time.

The first strategy I found useful in terms of time management, was to convert from dressers to open shelving in closets for all of our clothing needs.  I personally find dressers annoying - if they are full, it is hard to get the clothes in and the drawers shut, and kids are constantly pulling things out of them.  Because the dressers were in their room, they got climbed on, which is dangerous, and left open and emptied out, which is annoying.  Plus, that meant that I was bringing clothes upstairs to put them away, and then downstairs to wash, which meant there were always laundry baskets at the foot of the stairs.  Suddenly, one day, it occurred to me that we had a long row of shelving in the laundry room, that was holding up stored items, but that would fit the kids clothes.  Now, I use open shelving for their clothes and ours, and am finally about to move *our* clothing downstairs, out of our bedroom, and into a closet with open shelving (an old bookcase has been used for this) so that I can put it away more quickly and easily.  The only clothes that go upstairs are pajamas, and we come down in them to dress.  This means no more searching, and less time hauling.  Obviously, we have the space for this, and other people may prefer to use dressers, but I don’t like them - I find seeing everything useful, and things less messy this way. 

The second thing I do is to try and keep myself from going nuts and laundry from eating my life is to keep laundry to a minimum - even our minimum is a lot, of course, but if I can keep it down, this is more time for other things I like better.  That means that I double check my kids clothes before they go into the laundry - my kids have a tendency to throw things in even if they are rewearable.  My husband, on the other hand, has a tendency to overstate the rewearability of clothing, so the stuff he gives me to be put back on the shelf gets a quick look over and sniff test to see if I share his basic opinion that the pants will go one more day. 

We replace most disposable items with cloth ones, so this adds to the laundry.  To cut back on the laundry, we have oilcloth tablecloths, air out things that simply need a bit of airing and try to remember to change into work/play clothes before we start running about in the yard.  I really should become an apron person, but I haven’t been, but it is a wise habit to pick up.

Shopping at yard sales and thrift shops takes time, of course, so I try and plan for it, particularly since I don’t shop on Saturdays, our Sabbath, which is the biggest yard sale day here.  Many of my local sales have a Friday preview day, and I try and go then, and our area has a history of town-wide sales, often lasting a whole weekend, and these are great sources.  Sometimes we take the kids, but except for Isaiah, who has a natural talent for spotting bargains, they get tired quickly of sorting through unorganized piles of clothing, so I plan several times a year to go alone and leave the kids with Eric.  Although we’ve got a good local Goodwill, there’s much better thrift and consignment shopping near my mother in Boston, and I try and stock up there once or twice a year.  I also happily accept other people’s cast offs, passing on anything we can’t use to others. I occasionally shop at consignment stores, but these usually have higher prices, so I use them mostly for hard-to-find items.

Out of season and out of size clothes is kept in labelled bins, one for each size (18 mos, 12, etc…).  Shoes are kept by size on shelves - yes, we do pass on shoes here - the best research I’ve found suggests that the old “shoes are so personal that you can’t pass them on” thing is a myth.  Twice a year (usually April and August) I do a full sort out of the bins, a job I loathe, and reorganize the kids shelves.  I do a little of this at intermediate periods as they grow out of things. 

Having four kids, and also two farmworking adults, I’ve become passionate on the subject of buying clothing that really lasts.  Most children’s clothing lasts at most, through two kids (this is true of most children’s goods, too), but I’ve a few brands where I consistently am able to pass things on through all four.  Lands End sleepers, for example, don’t suffer regularly from either broken zippers or worn out feet.  While Hanna Andersson is mostly a girl’s supplier, the occasional boys item I’ve gotten from them just wears and wears.  It isn’t always a matter of high-end stuff lasting better, though - Gap clothing wears out extremely quickly, I find, while cheaper Carters stuff lasts and lasts.  When you shop, look at how it is put together - do you see any signs of fraying, or wear?  How are the zippers, buttons and seams?    When buying children’s pants, because my sons are all (except Asher) entirely buttless, I have learned that adjustable waists are essential - otherwise, they will be running around with their underpants hanging out.

Mens clothing tends to be tougher and more durable than most women’s clothing, and being six feet tall, I can wear a lot of guy’s stuff - in fact, because I have freakishly long arms, I find they fit better.  I no longer am sufficiently hipless to wear men’s jeans easily, but I routinely buy men’s shirts, and find they hold up to tough wear better.  Men’s t-shirts are often made of heavier cotten, their flannel shirts usually have heavier cuffs, and I find the buttons are even sewn on better - worth checking even for smaller people than I.  I can often find mens Carharts and other work clothes at yard sales and thrift shops, but almost never find women’s clothes.  I do find women’s surgical scrubs, though, and these make excellent (and comfortable) work clothes as well.

I will say, however, I find skirts to be more comfortable than pants for many enterprises.  Wide ones have good stretchability, and I can even climb trees in them (if I wear a pair of cotton shorts underneath).  They are lighter and cooler than most pants in the summer, but more comfortable to garden in than shorts, since they provide some knee protection (here I am not speaking obviously of miniskirts).  In winter, layered over leggings or long johns or even light pants, they are warmer than pants alone and less bulky and more flexible than pants and long johns.  I have “work skirts” as well as dress ones - denim is good, as is heavy cotton, and find they last better than most jeans or work pants.

Eli, my oldest, is a magnet for stains.  Unfortunately, he also looks just gorgeous - I mean angelic and astonishingly handsome - in white.  Thus, I can occasionally be tempted into buying something white or cream for him, on the theory that I will keep an eye on him.  This is almost always doomed to failure, and I am trying to stop doing it.  Generally speaking, I rarely buy anything white, cream or pale yellow for any of my kids, except the occasional “shul shirt” which gets put on immediately before we depart for synagogue and taken off the minute we get home.  Eli, unfortunately, gets his prediliction for stainage entirely from his mother, who is a notorious slob, so this is good advice for me too.

This strategy for clothing management is almost certainly easier if you have children and a spouse who don’t care much about what they wear.  This is mostly true in my family.  Eli would prefer strongly to wear nothing, but if forced to wear clothing, will tolerate my choices.  Simon would prefer to wear his Harry Potter shirt (Goodwill) every day, but accepts that this is not an option philosophically, and doesn’t much care otherwise.  Isaiah does have strong opinions about his clothing, and insists on being involved in the selection process - but also is willing to do the work.  Asher has strong opinions about pajamas, which must be pink (not really hard to do at his size), and about underpants, which should meet the same criteria.  Eric doesn’t much care what he wears, although seems to have a preference for things with holes in them .  I realize that some of this will change as the first four hit their teen years, and anticipate this with some trepidation.  Those who have people who care will either have to teach them to find their own stuff, or prepare to spend more time or more money.

So far, my kids are pretty comfortable with passing things down to one another - they occasionally are disappointed when they outgrow a particularly beloved item, but generally we make a big deal about the fact that they are growing, and getting bigger, and everyone is excited about it.  The kids like to hear the lineage of the clothing they wear…
“This shirt came from cousin Jake, and then Simon wore it, and now…” or “Remember, you helped me pick out that jacket at…”  At one point, five year old Isaiah asked his GNew York City Grandmother, who is not a thrift shop shopper, “Wow, Grandma, did you get this at Goodwill?”  Despite the general laughter, I was glad that my son thinks that good things come from thrift shops.

I should add that the reason my kids are as well dressed as they are, and I am able to do this is also due to the kindness of family members, who often buy my children high quality new clothing for birthdays and holidays.  The kids do get a few new things every year, and are very excited by them.  My sisters and mother also track sales and visit consignment shops and yard sales and pick things up for my kids - more eyes help in this project.  We are also the recipient of a great deal of generosity from my mother’s neighbor, my step-sister in law, my friend Elaine and others. 

I hate to sew, and for a long time “mending” actually meant “taking the clothes and putting them on the mending pile and waiting for the child to outgrow the item while feeling guilty about not ever fixing them.”  This is not a good way of saving money or making good use of things.  I have now managed to mostly fix this problem, by making a simple rule - I cannot knit until I have mended one item in my pile.  Since I love to knit, this forces me to get the sewing over with, and mostly keep up with it.  I have tried to divide the work of mending with Eric, but he is so spectacularly awful at it that this does not work.  I do make him iron on patches on jean knees, which is lazier than proper patching, but does the job.

I do not do zipper repairs well, and it is astonishing how often zippers are the thing that fails on an item.  What I’ve gotten in the habit of doing is cutting the zipper out, adding a strip of some heavy fabric scavenged from another item of clothing, ideally a bit with a nice heavy seem on the edge anyway, and cutting button holes in it, and attaching buttons.  I find this much easier than replacing the zippers.  I’ve also gotten good with Rit and other dyes for white shirts that have permanent stains or yellowing on them.  Amy Dacyzyn’s _The Complete Tightwad Gazette_ has a number of wonderful strategies for repairing slightly damaged clothing, and making it look good.

Socks and underwear do wear out rapidly, and while I will darn homemade or high quality socks, I draw the line at darning my husband’s sweat socks, which he buys in bulk - he purchases ones that are slightly imperfect.  They last until they get turned into rags, and by the time he stops wearing them (remember aforementioned prediliction for holes) they usually are undarnable.  I buy all the kids socks in white when I can, so I don’t have to do much matching - just grab two of comparable size.  I actually don’t personally believe in matching socks - during high school and college, I used to wear dramatically mismatched socks all the time, and I still like them that way.  Saves time and energy to just dump them in the drawer or an open basket and grab by weight or juxtaposition of color.  Eric likes the opposite strategy  - all white or all black, so they all match.  The kids like to pick their own socks, and seem to have gotten my genes for mismatches. 

We rotate clothing by what we are doing.  On days when we are mostly in the house (or for the parts of them that we are, say when I’m working at the computer), I usually wear Pajamas - but they didn’t always start out as pajamas - when shirts, sweats and loose cotton pants become too ratty to wear in public, they are moved over to the “pj” pile.  The same goes with sweats, tshirts and soft long sleeved shirts for the boys.  Or they are put into the “work/play clothes” pile, to be worn on days when we know we’re not going to be seen by anyone.  I try to remember to change into these clothes as often as possible to preserve the good ones.

Thus, a new shirt and pants arriving for Eli’s birthday, would at first be worn only for school or synagogue.  Gradually as wear began to show I might get lax about it, not bothering to change him out of it after school.  By the time they were passed down to Simon, they might be unfit for the nicest days, but perfectly suitable for regular days.  By the time they hit Isaiah, they would be “play clothes only” or maybe pajamas.  Odds are, before they hit Asher, they’d have become rags, diaper wipes, rag rugs or quilting fabric.  I’ve even experimented with making paper out of old clothes too thin to use for rags or quilting.  If all else fails, natural fibers can be composted - this is why I buy mostly natural fibers, although I’m fond of the judicious use of polar fleece, as long as they are making it.

The same is true of Eric’s and my clothing.  Nice stuff gets worn for synagogue or professional activities.  After a while, it gets worn to the grocery store, but not for the best occasions.  Eventually, it becomes either scrap, work clothes, or an extra layer under something else - if I’m going to give it away, I try to do it at the mid-point.

What we do with the scraps depends on the material they are made from - denim makes great quilts and braided rugs, flannel wonderful quilted duvet covers.  Wool sweaters can be unravelled and reknit, or they can be felted and used to make cut out mittens and hats or other items.  Old polar fleece pjs make great quilts.

I have a separate laundry bin now for “nice” clothes, because otherwise, if the laundry builds up for some reason, they can get buried under the other clothes, and aren’t ready when we need them.  I try to wash our synagogue clothes every Sunday, and have them ready to go, and to make sure that both of us have appropriate clothing ready and clean in case we have to attend a funeral or a short-notice professional event.  I know some people need these kinds of clothes five days a week, while others never dress up at all. 

I rarely iron.  In fact, when Simon was tested before kindergarten with a picture-words test, the only word he missed was “ironing board” and I laughingly admitted to the person administering the test later, that that was because he might never have seen one .  I hang my clothes out on windy days, and try and buy clothes that won’t need ironing.  The same is true about dry cleaning - I realize this isn’t an option for everyone, of course, but if you can avoid it, it is worth doing so.  For making clothing look nice, I think there’s nothing like line drying on a windy day - I sometimes plan my washings around them.

I wash everything, including diapers, in cold water, with a cold rinse.  We did replace our old washing machine with a front loader last year, after the old one began shredding my clothing, and I have to say that I have come as close to expressing love for an industrial appliance as I ever will with it - using less detergent, less water and less energy, it gets the clothes cleaner.  I also do some hand washing - I soak the clothes a good long time, give them a rub or squeeze, and rinse.  I do more of this in the warm weather, since it is a pleasure then, and the kids can often be persuaded to help, simply for the chance to get sopping wet.  No need to do major wringing - just hang and let it drip unless you need it soon.

I lived a long, long time without a personal washing machine, and I think if I didn’t have children, I’d probably hand wash or just go to the laundromat.  The investment in a front loader was worth it for our large household, but wouldn’t be for a smaller one. 

I try and do sheets every other week, but there’s a bit of bedwetting here, and it doesn’t always work like that.  There are rubberized pads that can go over sheets to keep them dry - that helps a bit.  My only other answer on this front is to keep praying that if the grid ever does do an extended crash, it is after everyone is fully toilet trained and done wetting the bed .

Ultimately, clothing is about keeping on top of things.  When our washer died last year, in the middle of the hottest, rainiest period of the summer, the laundry pile built up, I got mildew, and some of the clothes got holes.  If I keep organized, I can deal with the laundry in a matter of a few minutes a day - but if I let it build, I have to give it my time and attention on a much greater scale.

Sharon

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