I've literally spent over 2 hours sorting socks and I still have a basket of mismatched socks! As a single person I laughed at the whole idea of a sock monster taking away socks and leaving you with handfuls of mismatches. But now as a mother I know that this creep really exists and he's living in my house. I think he's moved his family into our home, cause honestly my pile of solo socks just keeps growing and growing.
My time is too precious to be spending an hour and a half matching socks! They're just socks! Please share some solutions on starving my sock monster, so he'll leave our house and I can spend no more than a few minutes folding socks every week.
Get a few of the larger zipper laundry bags. (Or regular size ones for smaller toes.) Assign one to each person. When their clean sock supply gets low, zip up the bag with dirty socks and throw it in the wash. Dry the same way. Just don't fill the bags too much, or the socks won't dry properly. From there, unzip and put directly into drawers.
For the most part I and my partner share socks. his feet are only a litte bigger than mine so size really isn't an issue. Since we share we just buy big bags of plain white socks. I don't even bother to pair them up any more I just put them all in the "sock bin" in our closet so it's grab two ang go in the morning. I (and my daughter) do have "cute" socks. I make a point to alway put one sock inside the other when I take them off and then separate them when I wash. At least that way I know I put them in the washer together.
last thing. we have a no shoe policy in our house so next to the door we have a bench where we store our "every day" shoes and our indoor slippers. I keep a laundry basket next to the bench so when we come home we kick off the shoes put the socks in the basket and put on our slippers or just go barefoot. This helped alot.
Do you have a cat? turns out that cats are notorious sock monsters. mine kept hiding baby socks under the tv cabnet.
My grandfather used to pin his socks together. I never had an issue with missing socks, but maybe it's a thing that I have to go through later in life. Can you please not send him to my house!? I did enjoy your sense of humor though. It was very refreshing!
Just thinki!!! You now have the ability to make oodles of sock puppets for your son and daughter to play with :) Never a waste!
Hi S.,
Matching socks is one of my least favorite duties for the same reason! So, I don't match them anymore. Since my kids are growing, they get new socks each winter. I buy all the same. Grey toe = son, pink toe = daughter. My husband matches his own socks each morning :-) I just throw them in his drawer. I don't even turn his right side out anymore!
My aunt has six children, four boys, two girls. She used to just throw all of the clean kid socks in a laundry basket. Each child picked his/her socks each morning. If they didn't match, my aunt didn't worry.
My 5 year old helps sort the socks into piles for each person too.
Good luck!
This might help, at the end of the day when everyone is putting their clothes in the dirty laundry, gather the socks of the day and safety pin them together. This will save you time on laundry day, and perhaps keep the sock monster away!
Hope this helps some. (the sock monster used to hit our house too!! -from time to time he still does!) good luck!
Since 2 of my children are older we just wear the same socks.I buy the same plain white so I don't have to sort them and then sorting out my husbands is easy and the little ones are too. I discovered that my front loading washer has a rubber rim around it and a bunch of my daughters little socks were stuck in there. So now I always check. A laundry bag is a great idea someone shared. I think I'll get one for the little socks. I also really like the laundry basket idea and letting everyone find their socks.
Just throw away the socks and let it go. Sock loss is a fact of life.
I think that the sock monster lives in every one's home, the only way I found productive in dealing with them is, keep the best socks. I know your thinking why? When your children are a little older and you need a birthday game or something to entertain them for a while, do what I did. We had a sock monster puppet party. You must have odd buttons, yarn, glue and such around the house, I know I did, I had the kids make sock monster puppets out of all the things that get left over mysteriously and they loved it. We had a contest to see who could make the funniest one. Good luck
I have sock problems too. I find them all around the house where my kids have taken them off and tossed them. I'm trying to train them to put them either in their shoes or in the hamper right away when they take their socks off. (still working on that, but I'm hopeful!...)
And like the other moms, I buy lots of the same socks too. It's much easier to put the pairs together when all the socks are the same! So I limit specialty socks. (White goes with just about everything anyways!)
Also, when I have left over socks from the dryer, I have a particular place to put them while they wait for their mates to be found (a spot on or inside the dresser). Because I just know I'm going to find the missing sock behind the couch or bed one day, or it will just magically appear in the next load of laundry. Then I match it to its already-clean mate.
Good luck!
