What to do with all those shoes

I grew up an only child. So large family organization was not needed. Now, as a mother of a large family, I needed to come up with ways to handle the chaos that can quickly come upon a large family. We live in a rather small house, about 1,200 square feet and our garage is finished.

Today's post is about shoes. Every mom knows that kids are ALWAYS looking for their shoes. It doesn't matter how many kids you have, at some point they are going to lose them, and you are going to be stuck searching for them. I haven't fully solved that problem yet, sorry!

What I have solved is my "outside shoe" problem. We used to have a large basket(though after 5 kids it didn't seem quite so large) that held one pair of sandels or crocs and one pair of shoes for each child that was deemed for outside playtime use. This worked well for awhile, with 3 kids the basket wasn't terribly overflowing, with 5, well, we had shoes scattered around our dining room table. Even if they did all fit, it started to become a game of basketball instead of a shoe basket. The kids would stand at the back door (which was on one side of the dining table) and throw the shoes into the basket (located on the other side of the dining table). Rarely did they make it, always they needed to use the backboard, which just so happened to be my wall. Yes, I live with a bunch of animals. They are my animals, and I love them. But they are animals!

Hence, the reason for the upgrade.

This serves two fabulous purposes now. One which I intended for it to serve, the other was an added bonus.  1. All the kids outside shoes FIT inside these baskets, inlcuding a pair of mine and my husbands for when we work on our Little Suburban Farm. 2. The eggs look quite nice up there, don't they? This gets them off my dining table, which gets crowded pretty quickly, but still keeps them on display and visible to guests, because, well, they are pretty!

The two big boys have one basket each at the top. Isabelle has her own basket in the middle, and Adam shares the middle with her. The two little boys share a basket on the bottom, for now, and I have the other basket on the bottom. We have not heard the "I can't find my other shoe," sentence since this upgrade (I can't say the same about the nice shoes, however). This shoe shelf curbed the basketball in the house, which was not allowed, so ALWAYS needed to be addressed and, now when we have guests over, they don't have to look at all those disgusting outside shoes while they eat their meal with us (or trip over them. many birds. one stone).

This particular organizational tool was thanks to my mom, who had to eat by those disgusting shoes when she came for a visit. I am very thankful for it, and for her. This also gave me the push to reorganize other areas of my home that just aren't working now that our family has grown. I hope to have more great advice for large families that I can share that work for me in the future.