Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Dresser woes

This may seem like a small complaint, but it's been grating on me.

My daughters have shared the same dresser for the past four years. The dresser has always been organized the same way. Each girl has a drawer for shirts, a drawer for shorts/pants/skirts, and a drawer for jammies/sweaters. Despite this constant organization, their dresser seems to be a mystery to them.

Now that they both pick out their own clothes in the morning, I'm likely to hear one complain that she doesn't have any shirts. I'll go in and pull open a completely full shirt drawer. The girl's response will be, "Oh, I was looking in the wrong drawer." We'll repeat this process many times a week as they hunt for missing clothing that's right where it belongs.

It's getting worse now that I am teaching them to put away their own clothes. I'll hand each girl a stack and tell her which drawer it goes in - shirts, shorts/pants/skirt, or jammies (no sweaters this time of year). The girls will head off to their room and come back a bit later for the next load.

The next day I'll go in to put away a few straggling items or to retrieve something only to discover that they have both crammed all of their clean clothes into one drawer, ruining all my folding efforts.

I've given them several lessons in the past weeks on what goes where, but it hasn't sunk in yet. I went to help Lily find a night shirt last night only to discover that all her jammies were in her shirt drawer.

Sigh. The lessons will have to continue.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brad said he was going to help me put away the clean clothes the other day. But when he got to the kids' room, he just didn't know where things went. I asked him, "why don't you just open the drawers and see?" And he just blinked at me. Honestly, what's so hard about it?

Unknown said...

labels with drawings on them??? I dunno. I have a 3 year old who seems to have inherited his paternal grandmother's OCD cleaning and organizing gene, so I don't have this problem. He organizes MY stuff, it's creepy

Keeffer said...

does clothing really need to be folded before going in the drawer? I've never found it to be the case. Although it is rare that my cothing makes it into the dresser so maybe I'm not the best judge. Maybe both girls are just natural born slobs. We're people too.