Milk and Cookies
with Linda and Kristen
Milk and Cookies is a savory web venue for cool products, useful tips, and idea-sharing, prepared especially for busy moms like you. From the must-haves to avoid-at-all-costs, we're dishing out tools for a delicious life balance.
Visit Linda's fitness site at Bodies in Motivation and check out Kristen's blog at Swistle.blogspot.com
Lately I have been feeling entirely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of children’s stuff in our home. We’ve got baby detritus everywhere — exersaucer, bouncy chair, jumpy suspended-from-doorway chair, Bumbo seat — and dealing with the eighty million toddler toys on top of all that was just getting to be a little too much.
So I made some small changes, and they have worked out so well I honestly feel like part of my brain has been cleared out and now can contain much more useful distractions than fretting about my cluttered house. You know, such as being able to quote Season 5 of The Simpsons in its entirety.
A while back, my mom gave me two of these awesome plastic bin storage units (they look a bit like this, although they’re drawers rather than stackable bins, and the whole thing is on rollers), and I’ve been using both of them to hold outgrown baby clothes from my older son. Now that my younger boy has gone through all of the newborn, 3-month, and even most of the 6-month-sized items, I managed to free up a whole unit and decided to repurpose it for toys.
I put it in the 3-year-old’s room and labeled each drawer (with some very fancy masking tape) as follows: Baby Toys, Cars Etc, Stuffed Animals, and Misc. Small Toys. Then I filled each drawer with its respective category of toy, as long as it was fairly small.
All the baby’s toys are accessible now, instead of being spread hither and yon all over the (dog-hair-encrusted) house.
The planes, trains, and automobiles that were littering every surface are all in one location, HALLELUJAH.
The stuffed animals are stored away and can be retrieved on a nightly basis. Sometimes he wants to sleep with the bunny, sometimes a particular bear, but now they don’t need to all be strewn over his bedroom floor or cluttering up the bedside table.
Best of all, the small, easily-lost toys are in one drawer where we can find whatever tiny whatsit he wants to play with. This whole system keeps the larger toy chest available for big toys, and the small stuff can live in these bins instead of falling to the very bottom of the chest and causing all sorts of Undue Trauma.
Before I even embarked on this organizational effort, the first thing I did was go through all of our toys and get rid of the mostly unused items. Broken stuff got trashed, other things — including books that weren’t getting read — got sent to Goodwill. It felt really good to pare everything down to a more reasonable level.
I was inspired in part by this article, which is SUCH a fantastic idea. I’m trying to put it into play in our home to a certain degree, by reminding Riley he needs to put toys back in the drawers before he takes new ones out. It doesn’t always work, of course, but it sure makes cleanup a lot easier.
Tell me, have you stumbled onto any super-successful organization tricks lately?
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We did the same as you recently, and I got one of my kitchen drawers back (it formerly housed all the crayons and coloring books known to man. I mean, our 4-yr-old). I LOVE my plastic drawers thingy!
My real problem is keeping up with the outgrown clothes (before I can get them down to our basement or out the door). So when you solve that one, CALL ME.
Lee | September 12th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Getting rid of excess stuff is the key. We just cleaned out my son’s toy box because we had the exact same problem you do - small toys fall to the bottom to never been seen again.
We had a garage sale, gave things away, donated to Goodwill, etc. the excess.
Now things are better in there. Hmm…maybe the cleaning out excess stuff would work in the rest of the house??
Lee I have a suggestion for you - I have a large bookshelf by my washer/dryer. As I notice things are too small I put them on a shelf. When the shelf gets full I donate everything to Goodwill or hand it down to other families I know can use the stuff.
Elizabeth | September 12th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
I keep a storage tub in my son’s closet and toss clothes in when they get too small, then I only need to straighten up the tub and haul it downstairs when it gets full.
As for toy organization, we’re not there yet, although I did buy a wall full of cube shelving from Target last year and try to put everything on the shelves at least once a week!
Brenda | September 12th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
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Cheryl Mahoney | September 12th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
I am terrible about the ridiculous amount of toys in our house, BUT I think I do well with outgrown clothes. I have a 7 yr. old girl and a 4 year old boy, so there are no hand-me -downs between siblings. So, at the start of each season (fall, winter, etc) I set aside a weekend to clean out closets and drawers. All out grown clothes go to Goodwill or I give them to freinds. This also goes for shoes and boots. Then, I can re-assess the situation and tell the family what they need (for gifts) and I know what I need to buy for them.
JMH | September 12th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
We have done much of the same. We have an old dresser that we use for the kids’ toys. Each drawer has a specific “genre” of toy in it which usually helps to avoid the Undue Trauma.
Usually.
Angella | September 13th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Here’s another trick for organizing that I picked up from my sister: Keep a few bins of toys hidden at the top of the closet, week 1 take down 1 bin. Week 2 place the bin at the end of the line and pull out a new bin of toys. This keeps the clutter to a minimum and the kids don’t get bored of playing with the same toys. They’ll be so excited to have new toys to play with every week!
Amanda | September 13th, 2008 at 3:26 am
I also use a plastic storage bin in the closet to store outgrown clothes. Once all the clothes from one size are in the bin, I sort thru and choose clothes to give away or donate and then move the bin to the garage for hubby to put in the attic. My daughter is only 9 months so the toys aren’t really too bad of a problem yet, but I love the ideas here!
Joy | September 13th, 2008 at 4:03 am
I keep an empty diaper box in the closet to put clothes that no longer fit. After I have enough of one size, I tape the box up, label it and pass it on to another family.
We dont’ keep any toys at all in our 3 y.o. son’s room (we’ve got a playroom, so they’re all in there). I don’t think that he would ever go to sleep if his room had toys in it. As it is, he probably gets up 7 or 8 times in the 2 hours after we put him to bed. Anyone got a miracle cure for that!?
Cara | September 15th, 2008 at 3:46 am
Funny - we’re getting ready to tackle this same chore. I am sick of the little pieces of some bigger toy sinking to the bottom of the toy box and having to empty the entire thing to get at that… I am so ready to purge and clean; I missed spring cleaning this year and apparently, we’ll be doing some major fall cleaning and reorganization!
A suggestion: Riley can’t read yet. If you want him to help with putting toys, etc. away, put photos (cut them out from magazines) of what goes in each drawer on the front of each drawer. Leave the word(s) there, too, so that as he gets older, he can start to associate the word with the picture.
Audrey | September 16th, 2008 at 5:57 pm