When it comes to organization my husband and I have magically always been on the same page. Our house stays extremely tidy and we actually enjoy keeping things in a certain order. We have the coordinated red and green bins for our Christmas decorations, bins for wrapping paper, bins birthday decorations, and bins for Halloween décor, not to mention loads of bins for the baby clothes that I can’t seem to part with just yet, all stacked neatly on metal racks in our basement. It was quite entertaining to see the excitement on my husband’s face when we finally bought a label maker to really step up our organization game (ugh, man we are dorks).
It wasn’t until this past holiday season that we realized we needed to start teaching our ways to our 3 year old daughter. It was high panic alert at the Simonie household just days after Christmas this year. You see my daughter’s birthday happens to be the day after Christmas. So, our living room looked like Toys’R’Us dropped off its missing holiday shipment. Oh, and by the way, my son’s 1st birthday was coming up just three weeks later. Needless to say, we were overwhelmed. As self-proclaimed neat freaks and organize-a-holics, we were not ready to just throw in the towel and pile all the new toys in the playroom and shut the door. We found it can be done in some pretty basic steps and then it can be easily kept nice even after play dates when it looks like a toy explosion happened.
Step 1: Wait for children to be asleep to clean out old toys to donate/sell. This step must be followed exactly. If said children happen to see any such toy that they haven’t cared about or touched in over 2-3 years they suddenly become tear-jerkingly attached to that toy and cannot part with it whatsoever. Magically, if the toys disappear while the child is sleeping, those toys seem to blissfully remain forgotten and all is peaceful in the playroom toy replacement and organization realm. (FYI – I don’t have a heart of stone. I do save some toys that seem to have sentimental value for my kids to decide when they are older if they want to pass on to their children.)
Step 2: Bins, bins, bins. They are your friend. We have a cube organizer that sits along one wall, a large bin for stuffed animals, a large bin for all things baby doll, one for puzzles, and one for Legos.
Step 3: Even as the kids wake up, incorporate them! We put on some fun jams and danced around the playroom like goofballs and would ask our daughter where she thought each item should go based on which category it looked like it belonged to. Kitchen stuff? Stuffed animal? Barbie doll? Lego? Musical?
Step 4: Label with words and pictures. This is a lesson I stole from my daughter’s nursery school. In order for her to start recognizing her name, they put her picture on everything at school (along with her name); her coat hook, her take home bin, etc. So, we used our fancy label maker to label the item and then either cut out part of the box it came in or a picture that looked like the item so she would start to recognize what went with what.
Step 5: Not everything has to be super organized. As crazy as my husband and I can be about organization, we still know our kids need room to just be kids. We let our daughter decorate the walls in the playroom with her “friends”, aka the characters from Sesame Street and Frozen. In addition, we replaced the closet doors with curtains, and filled the floor in the closet with pillows and blankets. It is probably my favorite thing to hear her in there reading to her animals and dolls, seemingly in her own little world using her wonderful imagination, just as a 3 year old should.
What are your tips and tricks for organizing toys and kids’ spaces? We’d love to hear how you manage the ever growing toy clutter and how you get your little ones involved!
