Large Family Idiosyncrasies #4: Colour Codes

How many toothbrushes are in your bathroom?

Most people have two or three, and they're easy enough to keep track of. In a big family, however, you are most likely looking at five or more toothbrushes, all from the same seller, and alarmingly similar. Add a couple (or ten) germaphobic kids, who are terrified at the thought of accidentally using someone else's brush, and the problem is magnified.

Another example: if you ever come to our house, you would probably see twelve cups on the counter. This may seem like a lot, but we are actually rigorous to keep it down to this number, since we can easily accumulate 16 used mugs and 36 glasses in one day. Here's how it happens:

A child, being thirsty, goes into the kitchen, fills a glass with water, drinks it, sets it down on the counter, and walks off. Soon another child comes in. He sees twelve glasses in a group, which were used at lunch. If he chooses a glass from the lunch group, he has a one in twelve chance of it being his glass, and thus not having anyone else's germs on it. However, another child has been in the kitchen before him, and chose a glass at random, so there is a one in twelve chance that his glass has been contaminated.

Okay, this is not a math problem, so I won't ask you to calculate the odds of randomly picking out your own glass from a group of twelve and it remaining uncontaminated, but it's a poor probability to start with, and gets even smaller as the afternoon progresses. So what does the child do? He takes a clean glass from the cupboard, drinks from it, and adds it to the group on the counter, thus giving future children even worse odds of picking their own cup. Obviously, in the toothbrush scenario, even this option is not available, since you can't use a new toothbrush every night.

Our family has come up with a clever solution to this conundrum: the Colour Code.

Every child is assigned a colour at birth (or at least as soon as they start drinking out of a cup), and we have rubber bands in that colour to put around our glasses: green, white, purple, yellow, red, blue, pink, orange, light blue, and light green. Girly colours are assigned to the girls, and boyish colours to the boys. Originally, the cups themselves were coloured, but as the family grew this became hard to keep up with. Now, we also have a row of labels on the counter to place our glasses on, to be further organized. One advantage of colours over words is that children learn to recognize colours before they learn to read.

The same concept works for toothbrushes, socks, and any other easily mixed up possessions. As the kids get older, they learn to keep better track of their stuff and it is not as necessary.