Out of everything people try to warn you about when it comes to babies, the one thing they don’t warn you about is how much stuff they need.
Babies tend to need a lot of…supplies and accessories to keep them raised and healthy as they develop, and it can all pile up. Bottles, bedding, blankets, even other things that don’t start with the letter B – your little ones are going to start taking up a lot more space than you expected!
Clothes are one of the biggest culprits here. Even before they start growing up to have their own fashion preferences, babies tend to have a lot of clothes and outfits to choose from. Despite their size, they can be hard to keep organized, and worse yet, babies have this nasty habit of growing out of their clothes faster than you can replace them.
What’s a parent to do?
Tips for Organizing Baby Clothes
Luckily, organizing baby clothes isn’t much harder than organizing clothes for anyone else – it’s just a matter of finding the space and knowing what you’re going to keep.
The first step is to take inventory of what you have, and the best way to do that is to sort them all by size. Parents know what it’s like having a newborn: the gifts come fast and early, and the clothes you get (whether new, used, or both) will tend to be a mixture of all shapes and sizes. Organizing your current clothing collection by size will help you get an idea of what your baby can’t wear anymore, could be wearing right now, and/or might not be able to wear for a while.
From there, you should know what you’re keeping and what you’re not. The easiest step right now is usually to store what your baby isn’t wearing. This could be clothes they’ve outgrown, this could be clothes they haven’t grown into yet, or it could even be seasonal clothes they don’t need right now, like sweaters and jackets.
Parents have a few different options here. If you plan on keeping some of the stuff you’re not going to wear yet, a lot of families suggest putting them into those vacuum sealed bags you use for leftovers, or sorting them all into plastic storage bins to kept on home shelving elsewhere in the house (and away from the more ‘active’ wardrobe).
Now comes the trickier part – organizing the clothes they still have to wear! Baby wardrobes pose two challenges, in that they’re both smaller than normal clothes, but still take up roughly the same amount of room. Bedroom dressers are a good solution, but they tend to make things a little messier with how small (and easily lost) baby clothes are. We’ve seen a lot of homes turn to things like drawer organizers and pantry organizers to help keep the smallest items safe from getting lost deeper in the drawer. (The next time you manage to find BOTH socks you needed, you’ll be glad you did it!)
Once this is done, all you need to do is decide what to do with the unused clothing. Surely there’s another parent you know that could use them, or a local donation center who would be happy to take them off your hands. Or maybe you just need to hang onto them until your little ones grow into it! Either way, just get a plan in place for the clothes they’re not wearing, and watch how much space you free up when they’re out of the picture.
And then wait to do it all over again when your kid outgrows this wardrobe, too.