Having five kids means different things to different people.

To my  parents, it means that they have lots of grandkids to brag about.

To my friends, it means I’m the one who never completes her sentences and is always begging for a carpool .

To my kids, it means hearing fifty times a day “siblings are a gift!” and understanding that they will not be taking a trip to Europe on my dime.

To me, it means that in addition to five times the love, I have five times the bills, trash, and complaints.

But I am not naive. To the world, having five kids means that my carbon footprint is personally responsible for the planet bursting into flames in the next fifty years. To make matters worse, we have a relationship with paper that pushers of other evils would crave. We can’t break ourselves of the kind you need for writing the papers and taking care of <ahem> business, but we needed to divorce ourselves from the kind that mopped up the spills. A thimble-full of water, a spilled cup of milk, and a gallon of any similarly precious liquid would necessitate the use of the same amount of paper towels. We needed to break this habit and quick  if not for the state of the planet than for my sanity.

There was no building up to this one, so we just stopped. Cold turkey. When it came time to purchase the next jumbo pack from Costco, we just didn’t. It took about a month for us to get used to it, but we haven’t really looked back since.

 

 Step 1: Make a place to store all the things you’ll need to make it work.

You are gonna need a bounty (see what I did there?) of reusable napkins, rags, and towels. Decide before you start where you will store everything. This little number was less than $10 at Walmart.

Step 2: Make rags.

We cut up old, damaged, stained t-shirts to keep as rags for those spills and other things you really just want gone forever. I could go on, but really you know that some of life’s messiest messes aren’t even going in your laundry, they are going in the trash. You need these rags for those moments.

Step 3: Stockpile napkins, towels, and washcloths just for kitchen use.

How many you ask? Well, we have found our sweet spot to be enough napkins for each of us to use one at every meal for ONE FULL day. For our family of  7, that’s 21 napkins.

We had over 30 at one time but the current number is 28.

As for towels, this is the whole stack of 12.

We have 10 washcloths.

 Step 4: Make sure your washing machine is good to go.

I’m just gonna spell it out. I do laundry every single day. If you don’t, you are gonna need to adjust your stockpile accordingly to your family and your laundry patterns. And please don’t tell me that there are people who don’t need to do laundry every day, it will just make me sad. Or throw a napkin at you.

You really don’t want to be stuck in an awkward situation where your friends or family are left high and so not dry. Like with salsa dribbling off their chins.

 Step 5: Have at least SOME of your napkins available for your guests when they need them.

I’m still working on this one. Most of the times, it’s a Hunger Games-esque situation where guests are competing for the last napkin. Or just begging for one.

So there you have it: A Lazy Girls’ Guide to Saving the World. One Paper Towel at a time. If your family size is in danger of tipping the scale from comfortable to catastrophic, it may be your best option short of a reaping every week. So just follow these simple steps to saving the world. Then you can be a super-hero. Like me.

-Erin

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