In just ten easy steps, you, too, can get your children’s drawers ready for fall and winter!

1.  Save every possible stitch of hand-me-down clothing you can get your hands on, even items your previous child may have loathed or ones they loved so much they near extinction.

2.  Wait until the switch is absolutely essential.  That month or so of sweatshirt mornings/shorts afternoons – way too early.  You must relish those last-minute mornings of fishing the one clean pair of long pants out of a random laundry basket.  Searching out hooded sweatshirts shoved into the sandy bottom of your forlorn beach bag – priceless.

3.  Reassess the situation when your children have shivered onto the bus for six consecutive school days.  Ensure that the sixth day follows a weekend.  See if it wasn’t just an acclimation period.  Grudgingly drag one bin up from the basement and pull from that during this waiting period.  If needed, you may also pull one stretched out kitchen garbage bag into your child’s room.  The clothes in this bag, however, may not be of any use to you as they were the ones that might not fit next season, but were so stinking cute you couldn’t bear to part with them.  Now is the time.

4.  After three days and nights of your children plying you to change out their drawers and your frantic scrambling to find clothes that fit them, but still sending them off looking like three of Fagin’s minions, start pulling your youngest’s summer shirts out of the baskets in her closet.  Make a pile of outgrown clothes to donate, a pile of ones that might not fit next season, but are so stinking cute you can’t bear to part with them, and a pile of those that certainly won’t fit next season but could work under a sweater right now.

5.  Leave these three piles on the floor of her bedroom for a day and a half.  Be sure to yell at your other children for knocking over and mixing up the piles.

6.  Open the one bin you’ve dragged up from the basement and put the shirts from it into the baskets in the closet you just cleared out.

7.  Repeat step 4 1/2, 5, and 6 for pants, sweatshirts, pjs, and bathing suits (the spot of which will now be filled by sweaters).

8.  Shove the rest of the clothes which you do not have room for – but are in perfectly good shape and kids are so messy you could always use an extra pair – into any nook, cranny, or hole you can find in their closet.

9.  Take the one bin you’ve managed to empty and bring it into your oldest’s daughter’s room.  Put her outsized clothes into it, where they will stay for the 2.5 years it will take for your next child to grow into them.

10.  Put all the newly filled bins back into the basement where they would sit collecting cobwebs for three months – except that in two weeks you’ll have to move them all about to get the one on the bottom into which you must place three more items you found lingering at the bottom of the hamper two weeks too late.

from operationwife.com

And that’s all there is to a smooth wardrobe transition from one season to another!  Easy Peasy!