Large Family Idiosyncrasies: Picture Proof

Large Family Idiosyncrasy #1: The Towel Mug Shot.

Has your family ever run out of bath towels? On a Saturday, with three or four people yet to shower by the next day, having all the towels in a damp, crumpled heap on the laundry room floor is a catastrophe of no small order.

How is such a state possible? Buy enough towels for the family! Take note when the supply of clean towels is running low, and make sure to start a load of laundry. This sounds like a simple solution, but let me assure you, large families are never simple.

For one thing, we have plenty of towels. In fact, they are divided between three locations, because we have too many to fit into one cupboard. An unfortunate side effect of this arrangement is that we are seldom aware of exactly how many clean towels are available for use. To further complicate the situation, children seem to have an idea that towels are sentient beings that will pick themselves up off the bathroom floor, drag themselves into the laundry room, wash, dry and fold themselves, and place themselves back in the cupboard. Numerous attempts to disabuse them of this notion have met with indifferent success.

After facing the frustration of an empty towel cupboard with increasing frequency as more children attained an age when they needed to shower every day, necessity drove us to a creative solution: towel mug shots.

We put all the towels in the house into one pile, had each child select one, and snapped a picture. This, then, was to be their towel for a week, during which time they were in charge of keeping it in a safe place, drying it out between uses in whatever fashion recommended itself to their ingenuity, and only at the end of an entire week was it to go into the wash.

The system has two features in particular to recommend it. First, it encourages multiple uses in between washings. My siblings had gotten into the habit of throwing their towels in the laundry after every shower, which placed our laundry routine under an unsustainable strain. Second, it allows the more finicky children to have confidence that their towel has not been smeared with toothpaste or used to mop puddles of water off the floor in their absence, since they can keep it in their room rather than the bathroom.

This method has worked fairly well for a few months now, though I do not know how much it is still enforced. The kids will have to be reminded of the rules every once in a while, of course. My towel, in case you were wondering, was green and blue striped—quite distinctive—and there is a mug shot of me with it, but since this is my post, I have suppressed the evidence.