Who's socks are who's?

How do you keep track of who's socks are who's?
I just read about someone else and how they kept track of their socks. I posted a comment on her blog about how I did it, so I thought it makes sense to share that with you!
With 5 children to sort socks for...its not always easy. I try a couple of things. As the other blogger suggested, I try to buy different kinds of socks for the kids. I do try this to an extent. The problem I have with it is that the next time I go to buy them, I can't find the same ones for each child on sale again, or more likely I forget which ones I get for each child if there are several kinds. So the other system I have for clothes and socks in my house is "The dot system". My girlfriend told me about this years ago and it works great.
The oldest living at home gets 1 dot on his clothes. The next oldest gets 2 dots. Next is 3 and so on. Elise is our only girl, so I just make an "E" on hers and that is because I need to keep straight which clothes go back to her mom's house and which stay with us.
With the dots, when your oldest is able to pass them down to the next child..you just add 1 dot and then its the #2 child's clothes. (I DO believe in hand me downs!)
It's an easy way to quickly identify clothing. Our 2 oldest at home right now are 14 and 15 and close to the same size. We also get them some of the same shirts (school t-shirts etc) and so it makes it simple to keep track.
In the picture you can see 3 dots on Zach's sock and 4 dots on Alex's sock. Drew's shirt has 2 dots on it.
It makes life much easier when it comes to sorting the laundry.

Color and function in your laundry room.

Laundry rooms do not have to be dull boring places that we dread having to go in and crawl through the piles of dirty clothes!
We may always have to climb through piles of clothes (but I hope there is some organization there)..but it doesn't have to be dull and boring!
Painting or wall papering is one option. But that can be hard to do because you have to move out your washer and dryer and its hard to do without that room for even a day. Another option is just using fun colorful baskets. You can get all kinds of colors now for baskets. I found these at Target.
I have a very small laundry room and when I first moved into this house my now husband (we were dating then) came in and put these shelves up for me. I at first just had some boring white baskets on them...but spotted these and had to have them!
It just gives enough color to make me feel a little better about going into that place of never ending dirty clothes!

Laundry Cubbies!

Here is another cubbie idea! This is what I use some more cubbies (can you tell I love them!!) for in my house. At the top of the stairs we have this little area that works perfect. By the way before Dave and his kids moved in, I had my scrap booking albums in these..and yes they were full. Anyway...I needed some way to sort the laundry (with 5 kids)and thought this would work. It works great.
I bring up the folded laundry in my laundry baskets and sort it into the proper child's cubbie. (By the way...does anyone know if cubbie should really be spelled cubby? Spell check doesn't tell me! Hee hee) The kids are then responsible for putting their own laundry away in their rooms.
The basket in the middle is for mismatched socks.
The basket on the top left is for my step children's clothes that need to go back to their mom's house.
If you look close you can see that the kids names are on the bottom of their cubbies. I just use scrap booking stickers for this.
I would love to have something like this in my laundry room...but it's not big enough.