The sock conundrum
There are many areas of being the working mother of a large family where I feel like I do a pretty good job. There are others where I fail completely. One of these areas is as Keeper of the Socks. I am completely and totally unable to figure out how to keep up with, sort, and effectively put away the huge numbers of socks that four children require. In fact, at our house, socks rarely get put away at all. Instead they live in permanent chaos in something known without affection as “The Sock Basket.”
(Witness the horror of The Sock Basket, just before J. rummaged for something to keep her feet warm before leaving for school this morning)
The Sock Basket lives in my bedroom, and every morning – once the weather turns cool enough for socks, as it has this week – the children can be found rummaging for socks that match – even sort of match. My point of view is that since no one really sees your socks once they are on your feet and under your shoes, finding an exact match really isn’t necessary. So what if the toe stitching on the right sock varies in color from that of the left sock. Variety is the spice of life! Right, kids??!!
The mismatched socks don’t matter as much these days, when the kids keep their shoes on all day at school, but in years past, when they attended a Montessori school where the children were required to remove their shoes in the classroom, it was a source of constant embarrassment to me. I tried to delude myself that no one really noticed that my kids frequently wore two different socks until one year, when the sweet teacher’s assistant in one of the classrooms presented each of my children with a pair of socks as a holiday gift. The message was clear. She felt sorry for them, and thought that maybe their mother was too mentally incompetent to provide them with properly matched socks.
I have tried, at various times over the years to impose some sort of order on the sock situation in our household. On at least three occasions that I can remember, I have literally dumped the entire contents of The Sock Basket into our large outdoor garbage can, and started fresh by purchasing exactly 10 pairs of identical socks for each child, color coded for easy matching. Surely, I thought to myself, with a reasonable overall number of socks in the household, and with each kid having his or her own color stitching, we can whip this sock problem. But what I found is that The Sock Basket is like its own living ecosystem. Once even a small number of socks end up on the bottom of the basket, its contents begin to grow and spread. Within a month of starting fresh, a huge number of strange socks of all types that I’ve never seen and didn’t buy somehow begin appearing in that damn basket. Resistance is futile. The children are all soon back to rummaging every morning, instead of choosing a neatly folded pair from the sock drawers in their bedrooms.
Baby socks are, of course, the worst. They are tiny and evil, and they love to separate themselves in the wash, meaning that since the latest member of our family arrived 14 months ago, we now have a large number of wee and useless singleton sockettes living in The Basket. I try to avoid socks altogether with C. leaving her barefoot whenever possible, and dressing her in tights the rest of the time. But now that she’s running all over the place, there’s no avoiding the headache of those teensy socks altogether. Just last week, I broke down and bought her 12 pairs of socks from Old Navy, all exactly the same style, and in only two colors. Eternal optimist that I am, I hope the simplicity of my baby footwear plan will prevent problems, but just this morning, I noticed that we already have two of the new baby socks in The Basket – each in a different color.
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We have a sock basket at our house and we don’t even have kids. How bad is that!
Katie, we had a sock basket in our house. There were 4 of us kids, too. I went to my parents house last weekend…and behold, the sock basket… in the living room (All four of us have moved out). When I questioned my Mom about it, she laughed and said, “Its meant to be.”
When my daughter was a baby we washed her socks in a lingerie bag. We still managed to lose several but it kept them contained.
I have the same problem. Each big kid has a separate style, not just toe stitching, though, so I can usually tell them apart, and throw them in the respective owner’s basket–theoretically, each kid is supposed to put the clothes in the basket AWAY, but this rarely occurs (never, for the boys) so their daily wardrobes remain in the laundry room. But even with ALL his socks in his own basket, one child is inevitably seaching for matches while all the others wait in the car, and I have to step in and help.
I can’t tell you how good it is to hear from other people that I am not alone in this sock basket thing… Sometimes it seems like everyone but me has a perfectly tidy, perfectly organized household.
We are hopeless, also. Yesteday 11-year-old Christopher was getting into the car for his ride to school when I discovered that he was wearing a pair of his dad’s argyle socks, circa 1980. They were knee socks. He was wearing shorts. Ah, well, the kid’s got guts.
Don’t worry about it. Everyone has a ‘black hole’ somewhere in their home. If they don’t they were either born organized or they aren’t having much fun. But if it’s causing stress before school, you might want to try something. Does your family sit together in the evenings to either chat or watch TV? I got better with laundry when we dumped it on the couch and folded while we chatted or watched TV in the evening.
I like the lingerie bag idea, too. The 3 older kids could each have two: one they dump their dirty socks in, kept in their room or the bathroom. The other has the clean ones already in it and they could fish them out of there.
I have no answer for baby socks. They are truly evil.
I use a lingerie bag for socks too. It also cuts down on the frustration of fishing socks out of the washer (I hate how they get stuck way in the back behind the paddles).
This is our life, exactly. When T was in preschool, I would buy one package of cheap socks from Big Lots every two weeks and would put a new pair on him each day in the car before I took him into school. I figured at 50 cents a pair, they were practically disposable.
We not only have a sock basket, we have several sock baskets. Socks overwhelm us. To top it off, the kids all wear red, but slightly different style, soccer socks. Oh, except for the one who wears white for home games and red for away, but again, all slightly different, yet distinct.
It’s hard to fake one having three white stripes, one having two white stripes, and one having verticle stripes, and last year’s that had stripes across the foot….and the fact that they each know exactly which is theirs, but never where both are….
I hate socks.
Hate. Them.
I am sooo with you on this one-but I can’t believe no one mentioned the phenomena of how you can buy a package of completely paired socks that go through the wash and come out at the other end in five different sizes!! I dread matching socks because each pair is really a judgement call. They come out with some stretched out and others shrunk and occasionally have a new tint!
The only socks in our house that are always put away are my husband’s-because they are the biggest so I can easily pick them out(no matching required, they’re all the same style). I HATE socks!
we have 2 laundry rooms (upstairs/downstairs). what i would like to know is how we always end up with one of each pair in each laundry room. how does this happen? do they seriously take off one sock, leave it in the upstairs hamper, then walk downstairs and take off the other sock? i’ve stopped wearing socks altogether… sandals in the summer, uggs the rest of the year. they even have ugg ballet slippers!
We have a sock pile, too – we each only have two colors of socks, so there shouldn’t be an issue. . .but then, since one of our colors is white in each case, we have to sort out the sizes. . .
I tell the kids that one of the pair went to live with Jesus.
This is so timely. Yesterday I went through my boys’ clothes and found that most of the items in the drawers were socks and underwear. (I don’t know why I have 25 pairs of size 4 boy’s underwear but that is a different story.)
There was no room for anything else. I decided to the put all the socks and underwear into a storage box. I saved three pairs of the socks and underwear for each of the three boys. We do laundry almost everyday so I’ll let the socks wear out and then grab the “new” ones from the box as needed. Cut down the numbers…
Can completely relate to the mismatched socks though. That was like that all last year for our family.
Our house is pretty simple. One man, one woman, one toddler. So everyone’s socks are clearly distinguishable. I do have several singleton itty bitty socks from when he was tiny. I couldn’t pass them on, but I can’t bear to throw them away. They’re too damn cute. I guess they’ll go in the scrapbook I never get around to putting together.