Not long ago, a method of laundry management evolved in our home that has helped eliminate doing laundry all weekend when all of the hampers in the home were full. How? At first, I made everyone's hamper smaller. Smaller hampers filled quicker and required me to do laundry more often--but there was less of it to do when these little hampers got full.

But then I got to only tending to one hamper at a time and inadvertently, one of the kids would run out of something--it would be a bad week for dirty pants or wetting the bed. Something would run out. We have a new baby--so bibs were a big deal.

I cut us down to one hamper. We have a good spot in the hallway and there's been a beautiful cloth-covered hamper that's been out of use for quite a while. Yes, everyone has to carry their dirty laundry into the hallway--but who cares? They should only have one outfit at a time to carry anyway. We don't leave dirty clothes strewn about the floors! We do have another hamper in the kids bathroom but traditionally, it never gets used. I use it for dirty towels and even then it's minimally used. So far, it's been wonderful

But due to holiday rush and household illness, I recently got stuck with another weekend of binge laundry. As I folded underwear, socks, bibs and cloth napkins I decided to only put half of them away and store the other half in my laundry room. It would take a little rearranging, but it could be done. After all--I did this with food: I would put 1 jar of peanut butter in the kitchen and another 6 in the pantry. When I got down to 3 jars, I'd start looking for it on sale to stock up again. Why not do this with laundry?

I did it. I put half of the bibs away and half in the laundry room. Last week, I ran out of clean bibs. But I didn't! I went to the laundry room, got the second half of the clean bibs and voila--clean bibs. It was wonderful. I saw that the bin holding my bib laundry was nearly full and threw the load in. It was nice that I had clean bibs in the meantime and wasn't rushed to finish my load of laundry. I had the same thing happen with underwear and cloth napkins.

In reality, you could keep less than half--an "emergency stash" that will just get you through a day or two if that's all you need. Personally, I like a little more flexibility; but that's just me.

Suddenly, laundry management got a lot easier. It happens more frequently in smaller batches instead of taking over a full day or weekend. And I'm happy to report that we have not run out of clean socks, underwear, bibs or cloth napkins in easily 2 months and I didn't have to squeeze laundry into my schedule to ensure that happened!