Inventory

I inventoried our children's clothes. I went through all of the boxes (of which there are quite a few) and counted and wrote down how many of each type of each size of clothing we have from 3T up to 16. I then put all the information into a table in Microsoft Word. Is that a bit excessive? Am I a little nuts? Well, yes and yes, I think.

Let me tell you why I did this. By now you know that I hate to waste money and I hate to pay full price for anything, so any time I'm in a clothing store, I check out the clearance racks. I also go to thrift shops, and the occasional garage sale. And I'll be standing there, and there will be, for instance, T-shirts for $1. And I'll think to myself, now what sizes of T-shirts do we need more of? And I won't know. So I either won't buy any, or I'll guess, and sometimes guess wrong. Now, you might say, it's only a dollar, who cares if you buy one and it turns out you already have 15 in that size? Because those dollars add up, my friends.

When Code-man was little, I could keep all of the clothing information in my head. It was pretty easy, considering I only had one child, and pretty much only had the clothing that he was currently wearing and those he had grown out of. Adding Logo (MC) to the mix made it slightly more difficult to keep that info in my head, but I had a handle on it. Enter Bubby, and now all bets are off.

Witness the list in action: yesterday I'm standing in Target and I see swim trunks for $2. I think to myself, surely we need some size 8 swim trunks. Probably some 4/5 and 6/7 as well. I whip out my trusty list, find the swim trunk column, and discover that we already have 3 pairs of size 8 swim trunks, 2 of size 6/7, 1 size 4/5 and 1 size 5. I think that's enough for now, and I did not spend $6 on swim trunks we didn't need.

I'm not sure why I'm telling you this. Maybe because I'm proud of my solution to a pesky problem. Maybe because I think I need help. Maybe because I think my experience will help you in some area of your life. Who knows?