"Which one's the Tuesday one?" Isla asked on Sunday night, holding up two identical grey sweatshirts in the doorway of the airing cupboard. The honest answer was that neither of them is, and that was the whole problem. Two sweatshirts that look exactly the same are a recipe for wearing one for nine days and the other for none, so in the first week of term we settled the question with a marker pen and a rule.
The rule is simple. Each child has two school sweatshirts, A and B. A has one dot inside the collar label and B has two. One dot is Monday to Wednesday, two dots is Thursday and Friday, and that is the whole system.
How the week runs
We don't wash uniform every night, and nobody here would thank me if we did. Nine loads a week is already plenty. What we do instead is stagger two washes around the days the washing machine is already busy:
- Sweatshirt A: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. It goes in on Wednesday evening with the towels and is dry by Thursday.
- Sweatshirt B: Thursday and Friday. It goes in on Monday with the weekend clothes and is dry by Wednesday.
- Polo shirts: one a day from a pack of five, following the same two washes, so the five-pack always covers the week.
- Trousers and pinafores: worn until they say otherwise, which is usually three days, and washed with whichever sweatshirt is going in.
It works because each sweatshirt has plenty of slack. A is clean again by Thursday but not needed until Monday, and B is washed on Monday but not worn until Thursday, so a wet week doesn't matter. In September the line still does the job on dry days, and from October the airer and the dehumidifier take over. It also means I never need anything dry in a hurry, which is part of how we manage without a tumble dryer.
Labels on everything
Every item of clothing that goes through the school gate has a name in it. I bought sixty iron-on tapes for £6.50 and did the sweatshirts, polo shirts, trousers and pinafores on the ironing board over the bank holiday weekend, one eye on Mabel, who thinks an ironing board is a sort of table made specially for her. PE kit, socks and anything with a care label too thin for a tape get a name in laundry pen.
It sounds fussy until you've seen the lost property box. On Friday afternoon, waiting at the infant door, I counted fourteen sweatshirts in it, and eleven had no name inside at all. One of them, I'm fairly sure, was Zain's from last year. Priya has lost his twice since Reception, and she now writes his name on everything with a thoroughness I admire.
Where it went wrong
The rule has survived a week and a half, though not entirely intact. On Tuesday Alfie sat in a puddle on the way home and sweatshirt A, two days into its run, was plastered in mud from hem to elbow. I put it through a quick wash that evening, and on Wednesday morning at 7:50 it was still cold and damp at the cuffs. Ten minutes with the hairdryer on the landing fixed it. I'm not proud of the landing, which smelled of warm wet jumper until lunchtime.
That is the weakness of two of each. There's no third sweatshirt, so a wrecked one means the other one has to do two jobs. I've thought about a third each, and at £13 apiece I keep deciding to wait for the first proper disaster. Isla's old Year 4 sweatshirt is already on its way to Anaya, and it would drown Alfie.
The rest is cheap. Detergent is the Aldi non-bio, about 9p a wash, so two uniform loads a week cost me 18p in powder plus the electricity. Stains get a dab of washing-up liquid and a nailbrush before they go in the basket. Everything is hung straight from the line or airer onto a hanger, not folded, so there's almost no ironing beyond the pinafores on Sunday.
Mabel has adopted the Monday jumper as a bed. The lint roller now lives on the newel post, next to the damp coats, and I have given up pretending it's anything but part of the uniform.
