Last summer, in an effort to simplify our family life, I purged all but eight outfits per kid.

It worked.  When the kids know that Laundry Day happens once a week, and that they only have enough outfits to wear one per day, they are not quite as likely to put on a different shirt when they get home from swimming.

Not quite.

I would love to do it again, but we will be gone for 10 days in the first two weeks of summer.  Eight outfits and ten days . . . even a Theatre-teacher-type can do that math.

Yes, I could do laundry on vacation.  But I don’t want to HAVE to do laundry on vacation.

For now, I’m planning to purge down to ten outfits per kid.

Or  . . . buy more so they each have ten outfits.

Which is the point of this post.  I have no idea how many summer clothes my kids have.  It’s laundry day and my daughter’s drawers are empty.  This should mean that she has one week’s worth of clothes.

Except that she tends to change several times a day.

I know. This drives some people crazy.  All that extra laundry!!!  It probably would drive me crazy, but I often change two to three times a day myself, and so it seems perfectly normal. (Yet another example of how normal is quite the relative term.)

And . . . the boys wear uniforms to school, so they’ve only been wearing their summer clothes on the weekends.

Today . . . is all about the count.  Shirts and tops and undies and socks. How many do we have and how many do we need?

And do you know what I’m most excited about?  The thought of getting rid of outfits 11 through ???

For the girl who resists to-do-lists and gets a headache just thinking about deadlines, I do love a limit.  It cuts out all of the “what-ifs” and lets me see things clearly.

If I have to choose, the little-stain-that-maybe-no-one-will-notice becomes the little-stain-that-helps-me-make-my-decision.