Earnest Parenting.com logo

Encouraging Heroes. You can be one too.

My weekly post at Forever Parenting went up yesterday about organizing kids’ toys.

There’s still time left to get into the drawing for your very own copy of Sentinel: City of Destiny.

Hm.  Well.  That’s it. 🙂 Happy weekend, everyone.   Mwah.

The weeks after Christmas are a great time to take a look at organizing the kids’ toy room. Or toy closet… toy area… wherever you have the kids keep their toys. Right now our boys have all their toys in their bedrooms and closets. 4 boys in 2 rooms means that we have to be pretty efficient with storage. Some of my strategies are

*Keep only large toys in the toy box
*Use labeled bins for small toys. Each label has a picture and a word on it.
*Either fix or toss broken toys.
*Limit gifts to certain categories. For example, the boys play with Legos so I have encouraged relatives to stick to that category rather than expand to K’Nex and Lincoln Logs and so on. It’s more fun to play with a lot of one thing than small bits of many. Plus, it’s easier to organize.
*The small chunky board books for the little ones fit nicely in a plastic basket on the shelf. Larger books stand neatly on the same shelf.
*Each boy has at least 2 “treasure spots”. For the younger ones, it’s two baskets on the bookshelf that hold whatever they want to keep. (I do encourage them to only treasure items that have no other home.)
3 or 4 times a year, I go through the toys with the boys and return items to their proper boxes. We also look at how many items can be culled from the room. Anything they’ve outgrown goes. Broken items are dealt with, and I encourage them to donate or sell as much as I can from their remaining supply. They’ve been surprisingly receptive to this, especially if they get to sell items at a garage sale. Anything that doesn’t sell goes to charity. Even the two packrats are willing to evaluate and decide whether or not an item still makes them smile. I will push them to give up things they’ve obviously outgrown, but am sure to respect their wishes if they want to keep something.

So how about you? Any neat tips and tricks on keeping the kids’ stuff under control?