With the cooling of the weather comes the biannual “clothing swap.”  That is, it’s time to pack away the summer things and haul out the winter clothes.  The kids, in particular, get pretty excited about this, because it’s like getting “new” clothes!  (They often also rediscover old favorites.  I heard lots of “I remember this!” today!)  It can also be quite an ordeal, though.

If your children are still little, and you haven’t developed a “system” for this, feel free to use ours as a starting point.  It goes something like this:

1. Make sure all the laundry is done.  (This is the hardest part for us!)  This way you aren’t finding “stragglers” for the next week or two and having to haul bins back out to pack them away.  You want to be working with everything at once.

2. Have the children remove from their closets and drawers (neatly!) anything that is now off-season, and set it aside.  Socks and underwear are, of course, not seasonal.  Some jammies are year-round.  And we generally keep out at least one swimsuit all the time.  (You never know when you might end up at a hotel with the swimming pool, or something.  It’s a pain to try to dig the swimsuits out of the bins before a trip.)

If the children are very small, you will, of course, have to do all of this for them.  By the time they’re five or six, they can do much of it themselves, with supervision.

3. Pull out the bins/boxes of the coming seasons’ clothes.  Have the children try everything on.  (There’s no sense ending up with stuff in the drawers that doesn’t even fit.)  This can take a little while.  If you have girls, as I do, they’ll probably love it, though.  Most boys, probably not so much.  If it fits, it goes into the drawer/closet.

4. When everything has been tried on, it should either be put away, or set aside if for some reason it is to be gotten rid of.  If it doesn’t fit, it will be back in its box by size.  But the box/bin should be predominately empty at this point, and all of the clothes that were pulled out of the drawers earlier can go into it.

Be sure to have each child keep out a few pieces from the off-season so they’ll have something to wear when the weather first starts to turn again and you haven’t unpacked the next season yet!  I usually supervise this part so they choose something pretty basic that can mix-and-match to last them a week or two if it needs to.

This is also a good time to “inventory” their wardrobes.  This is when you’ll know if one child doesn’t have any jeans that fit, or one daughter has fourteen dresses but no shirts.