Reducing Stains with Toddlers - Homemaking Tips

My daughter is 2, she does really well feeding herself, but lets face it... she's 2. She's going to get stains, and I'm not going to keep buying her clothes just for them to get stained right away.  Here are a few things I've started doing in the last 2 months because I was tired of the stains.

1) I keep her school menu in the nursery.  Some of you are probably thinking, "How does that help?!" But yes I use my daughter's school menu in the nursery. "Why?" So I can look at the menu and pick out the clothes she'll wear for the week based on the stains she is likely to accumulate that day. Spaghetti, go red; blueberries, go purple. I hate dressing her in stained clothing, but I know she's just going to get more stains. Now I try to minimize stain appearance, so I can dress her in stained clothing and not worry about her looking like a mess.

Tomato Sauce and Chocolate = red shirt or no shirt in this case!

2) To prevent stains at home, we take her shirt off at the dinner table and she gets her bath right after dinner.

3) After she's done eating and we're going to wash her hands and face, she always wants to touch the wall or the chair or me.  So we've started walking to the bathroom with our hands held high in the air.  I walk like this too as an example.  No more handprints to be cleaned up after.  We look silly, but it's SOOOOOO worth it.

4) This tip works for girls, more so than boys: If we are going somewhere where she has to be dressed up and there is food involved (like a restaurant, wedding, funeral, party) instead of a bib, I bring her apron.  It looks cute on her, and it covers a lot more.  Saves her cute dresses from stains without undressing her in public, but I don't have to try to feed her and fight with her saying "me do it".  Let's be honest here, she stopped wanting to be fed and started grabbing for the spoon herself about the same time she started eating solids.

5) If she does gets stains, I have the Martha Stewart Stain Guide handy.

Maybe I should start wearing red shirts on spaghetti day too!  I hope these help!