Mom tip: Make Shopping With Kids Easier!

This is an older post from 4 years ago. I added a few new things but left most of the info the same. I wrote this back when I was not able to post on a regular basis so I told myself I had to save them up until I could. I am no longer doing this! I will post whenever I have an idea and am able to write it. It might be once per day, once per week, once per month, or once per year. 

Oh, mama, I know that feeling every time you think about running errands and the anxiety wells up inside you! "Will they be angels? Will they wine and complain? Will they ask for everything they see? Or worse, will they pick up everything they see? Will the site of food suddenly remind them they are STARVING? Will we have to take 10 potty breaks? Will they start playing hide and seek...or worse, TAG in the clothing section?? Do we REALLY need to buy groceries today?!"

Don't get me wrong, I love my kids and for the most part they are well behaved. But they are KIDS! And with four of them, there is always someone to play with and it doesn't take long for them to wind each other up! What should be a 20 minute trip usually ends up being a 2 hour trip. And some days, I'm just not sure filling the fridge up with groceries is worth the stress! I'd much rather just make PB&J for dinner and play with my little sillies! Alas, at some point, we all must go out!

Although there are several things I've learned over the years to help the trip go more smoothly, my favorite trip is any trip that keeps the kids in the car for the most part!

Save time on laundry

With four kids, we have a lot of laundry! I have tweaked our system over the years until it really runs mostly smoothly now. We will be adding another member to our household (my mom) in the next year so we will have 7 people's clothes to wash, plus food towels, sheets/towels, and whatever else ends up in the laundry room. Here's some tips I have that will hopefully help you as well!

1) Have your kids help if they are old enough. Even a little kid can pick up the clothes out of their laundry and hand them to you one by one to put in the washer. I always made sure my kids had a hamper and reminded them daily to put their clothes in the hamper. Even a two year old can throw dirty clothes in a laundry hamper. When my oldest was little, he had a hamper with a basket ball goal design which encouraged him to make a game of it.

2) If your kids are older, have them do their own laundry! Our kids have been doing their laundry since they were about 8. At that age most of them could fully understand how to do their laundry and could reach all the buttons. They had already been helping so they knew how much soap, spread out the clothes inside, etc. The only problems we ran into were not being able to easily lift and pour the big jug of soap. Our house wasn't set up where a big jug with a pump built in would fit near the washing machine. So we found a small pump bottle of method laundry detergent that they could easily hold. We refilled it with our regular laundry detergent when it got empty and it has been going strong for years! We figured out how many squirts were needed to equal the correct amount of laundry detergent and wrote that on a piece of masking tape on the bottle. Unfortunately, Method doesn't sell that bottle anymore, but I suspect a regular liquid soap bottle would do the same trick.

3) Put your family on a schedule. We used to just wash clothes whenever someone's hamper was full and were always playing catch up. So we assigned each person a day to do laundry. Monday - Thursday are kid's laundry days and my husband and I wash our clothes and any other laundry on the weekend. When my mom comes, we will probably just put her on Friday and keep rolling with our regular schedule.