As I’m doing what seems to be an endless amount of laundry, I often think back to my own childhood and wonder if I too had this many clothes as a toddler? Is it even possible? I’d like to think I was different, that even as a 2 year old I was a minimalist, but then I see how much my Mom loves to buy my kids clothes, and I’m sure she did the same for me and my siblings too when we were still in diapers.

And so it goes. Kids needs clothes and lots of them. What’s the best way to keep it all organized without losing your mind?

One tip I picked up early on was to have a system that organized all the clothes they are currently wearing and what they’ll be wearing next – in other words, a size system. You can organize this in different ways, but what worked for us was to take a dresser and mark each drawer with a size and keep the different sizes all sorted by what drawer they were in. This made it much easier to get rid of clothes too because there was no longer any question over whether or not they’d need it – if it was below the current size we knew it could be safely donated.

But this alone was only half the battle. We found that storage itself became a problem, as the clothes seem to breed and replicate whenever we weren’t looking.

The solution was buying not one but two junior armoires and putting them in each corner of the room. We wanted storage not just for clothes but also space for some toys too. Most portable closets designed for kids know that they’ll be used for more than just clothes and include built in shelves and drawers that you can safely shove a bunch of toys in to get them out of sight.

Beyond the sizing system and setting up extra closet storage, everything else was just common sense. We bought second hand when we could. We tried to buy clothes out of season to save money when we could too. And while we tried to make time to donate clothes once every couple weeks to get back some extra drawer space, in reality it only happened maybe twice a year, but we still did it.

What are some tips and tricks you picked up raising kids that helped you manage their wardrobe?