Socks

 The only thing that will kill you as a mother of  a large family is pairing socks.

There are solutions.

I remember a crazy campfire song, that is usually sung in rounds.

 "Black socks, they never get dirty;

the longer you wear them, the blacker they get.

Some times, I think I should wash them

but something keeps telling me
oh,  not yet, not yet, not yet"

I did not seriously consider this option, though. After ONE day stuck inside an active child's running shoe, socks NEED to be washed.Oh well, sometimes I did four loads a day and socks really didn't take up that much room.

Still socks disappeared into mountains of laundry and I could never find them all.
Socks need to be PAIRED!!!
Or do they?
That was the brilliant, out of the box sort of question I asked myself one day.

New solution

Buy LOTS of black socks in every size,throw them in a basket

and hope for the best
.
That was the plan.

I decided to simply toss them into a wicker basket with a three-foot circumference and a height of two and a half feet..
I must ad
BUT little girls don't like black socks. They like pink socks. To make matters worse my mother bought cute socks with frills and bows and patterns that the girls really needed and loved.
 NONE of them were the same!

So although I used the toss and throw method of pairing, some mornings found us frantically searching for some semblance of a pair but it made life exciting.