Attempt #... 100 (Give or take a million)

One of the fun aspects of parenthood, I think, is the initiating and tweaking of ideas and techniques for caring for your home and children.  There are limitless ideas for every teeny-tiny aspect, and yet it's kind of nice to evaluate how your techniques are working and sometimes try out new ones or give small adjustments.

It took me years of attempting to implement Flylady's "load a day" laundry system before it finally clicked as a routine.  It happened to coincide with including the boys in the putting-away process, and though we don't do it "perfectly," it gets the job done. (hee hee)  I've tried several different techniques for having the boys put their clothes away.  At first, since it was before full-day school, we used to do it first thing after waking up.  I'd sit in the hallway and parcel out the clothes while folding the adult ones.  When I had Hollyn that put a kink in the routine though.  A previous technique had been to put kid clothes into a bucket which Brennan carried upstiars, but the boys' clothes outgrew it so I moved on.

Last night I found 3 empty baskets which have been hanging around trying to find a good job.  They've been unsuccessfully designated as baskets for "things going upstairs" or "things going downstairs" or "toys" or whatever.  Anyway, last night I grabbed them and used one for each child to have their OWN basket of laundry to put away.  Because I'd thrown random toys and books into the laundry basket previously, I ended up dividing those things up and placing them into the baskets too.  Light bulb!  This brings me to my newest tweak.  It's pretty basic.  Each boy has their own basket.  I will put their clean clothes plus anything else of theirs or that belongs in their room into said baskets and they'll be in charge of emptying it before going to bed.  To make it more official, I grabbed some paint and labeled the baskets. :-)

What I love about this is that it will also hopefully help with the issue of living room clean-up which has previously eluded us.  I haven't found a consistent strategy there yet.  Not for lack of trying many, many of them though.  Anyway, I'm excited to try out this catch-all basket idea.  I think it's good for our current situation, where both boys are old enough to do it, and the baby is too young to be contributing that kind of mess.  (The hard part is that young age when they're messy but not old enough to carry everything back upstairs.)

What kinds of things do you do for laundry and toy clean-up?  Does it work intermittently, pretty well, or super amazing?