Toys Galore!

***I would like to start out with an apology for missing this weekends posts. Life has gotten in the way unfortunately. 

I’ve not been able to declutter quite as fast as I had hoped. My original plan had been to show my amazing kitchen declutter. Well, that didn’t exactly happen. Life slightly got in the way. I did however manage to tackle our mass amounts of toys.

Now I didn’t declutter all of them but I did pull several out to add to our yard sale this spring. The rest I have divided for toy rotation. I’m really hoping that the kids, specifically boy child, will understand that we half the toys are on vacation for a couple of weeks and that we are only going to have access to about half our toys at any given point. The last time we rotated toys, he really struggled with the idea that some toys were just put up for a short time. We even tried a trading system where he had to trade one toy type for another. Little miss doesn’t seem to notice when toys are missing so I don’t think she will mind the rotation. The change will be done while both kids are not at home and hopefully the toys will spark the new toy joy when they see them.

Such total concentration.

Now on to the declutter. I totally forgot before pictures but you can imagine how messy it would get. The kids would dump out all the toys in the playroom all at once even adding a few from their rooms. Same thing would happen in their rooms too. Now it didn’t take me long to clean it up since everything has always had a home but it would completely overwhelm the kids to the point that they would refuse to play in there and couldn’t clean up themselves. This is what spurred my decision to focus on toys first. Hopefully, simplified toys will occupy the kids so I can spend bits of time focusing on the rest of the house.

I first tackled the playroom. I did most of the work after the kids were in bed. I do go through and purge the toys on a fairly regular basis for toys they have outgrown so there may not be quite as many as you might think in the yard sale pile. So here are the toys that didn’t make the cut.

• Older Fisher Price Little People play house – This was given to us about a year ago by a friend who was moving and couldn’t take it with but it was slightly broken. Then Little Miss was given the newer one for Christmas this year so there really is no need for double doll houses.
  
• Plastic ring stacker – Both kids have pretty much outgrown the baby toys so this one finally is getting the boot. It was much loved and used to help Little Miss make some connections that typical kids make easily.
  
• Vibrating Back Massager – The Boy Child used this as a sensory tool for a while but since it has not had working batteries and he hasn’t cared for a while now, it’s time to pass it along.
  
• Various other odds and ends – Little Miss has a tendency to tear everything up so we did find a bit of destroyed books or shredded tissues stashed in the corners. We also tossed a handful of other baby toys.

That doesn’t seem like a lot to get rid of but I tamed the clutter monster through toy rotation instead of purging in this case. A few toys will remain in the room at all times like the play kitchen because let’s face it, no one has room to store a big play kitchen for it to be rotated out. Here’s the toys that are currently in rotation.

• Musical instruments including the new big kid keyboard.
• Wood blocks
• Balls
• The Fisher Price Little People with the doll house and princess castle
• The Hungry Dino (because I don’t remember the actual name haha)
• A handful of smaller board books and the 2 electronic books.
• The bead slider whirly toy.
• The brailled alphabet apple.

That still seems like a lot of toys but truthfully it is a whole lot more manageable than what we had in there before. Here’s the list of what is put up and out of rotation.

• -Lego Duplo’s because well choking hazard.
• -Chunky and knob puzzles simply because they don’t get played with right now.
• -Baby doll accessories.

Ok so it really does not seem like a lot taken out. The biggest help with the chaos is the Duplo’s. I love Legos and so do my kids but they sure are a huge clutter inducer. Little Miss will dump the whole box just to hear them dump or Boy Child will dump them to find the exact piece he wants. Then, neither of them will want to pick them up. So removing the Legos alone helped tremendously.

Our amazing finished play room

Then I moved on to Little Miss’s room while she was eating lunch the next day. Here room was a disaster. She had everything on the floor and way more toys than she could play with at one time. So while I had a few minutes where the kids were completely occupied with stuffing their faces, I dove right in. These are the few toys that didn’t make the cut.

• Her bigger baby doll.
• The Little People roaring lion that has no off switch.
• The basic shape sorter that somehow had the top disappear.
• Numerous single pages from multiple former board books.
• A weebly wobbly beady popper toy.

I didn’t do a whole lot of actual sorting in her room. I basically sorted it by what was staying in the room and what wasn’t. The rest of what came out of the room for out of rotation toys is as follows.

• 3/4 the first builder Legos.
• The small baby doll accessories that were choking hazard.
• The Little People farm animals.
• The play garden mini jungle gym to eventually take out side when it gets warmer.

A peak into the previous chaos.

Again, this doesn’t seem like much but for her little tiny room, it was a lot of stuff in there. She still has plenty of toys to play with back there if she wants. Here’s the list of the keepers.

• The new toy washing machine.
• Her smaller baby dolls with all her doll clothes that she can practice her favorite past time, folding laundry, without spreading and mixing our clean and dirty laundry all over the house.
• A small box of the First Builder Legos.
• Little People zoo animal with the safari train and one zoo keeper to drive the train.
• Jumbo stacking cups.
• The bigger cars.
• A small box of random smaller toddler toys including a teething ring and the small stacking cups.
• Her toy camera, chair, and push train.
• A few stuffed animals.

She also has a bean bag chair that we store extra out of rotation stuffed animals. Boy Child has one too but we will get back to that later. Her room is so much more manageable now that there aren’t as many toys. She is really starting to actually figure out how to put Legos together but she really doesn’t need 200 of the things. Plus, with her propensity to put things in her mouth, even the bigger Legos has some possible choking hazards in the smaller pieces. So those just got weeded out temporarily and might get added back as she discovers more and more of what she is capable of building with them.

The shelf in Little Miss's bedroom completely tidy.

Before Boy Child went to bed that same night, I started in on his room. He had an even bigger mess and I pulled a laundry basket full of toys and stuff out of his room. Although not a lot ended up in the yard sale box. He already has several toy set put up in the top of his closet as one out at a time toys because they have the teeny tiny pieces that need to be controlled. The main thing I got rid of in his room was all the scribbled, stickered, and torn coloring pages and trash and tags that he had collected. Unfortunately he thinks he should keep every single tag with a picture that he likes on it. He even had a couple scratch off tickets that were used and not worth anything in his stash. I snuck all the trash out of it and neatly stacked his coloring books and note books in the box with his crayon box and magnifying glass.

Basically the toys we pulled out were mainly for rotation. I guess I really have stayed right on top of the kids’ toys and keeping them to the minimum of what they play with. He did decide to get rid of a couple of books he said were scary but that’s about it. Well here’s the list of out of rotation toys.

• Baby dolls and accessories.
• My Life boy doll and accessories.
•  Wooden train tracks and trains.
• Matchbox cars.
• Wooden play castle.
• About half his book collection.
• Stick horse.

He helped me choose what went up and what got left out. He was put in control of the choices. Here’s what he chose to keep out.

• Dinosaurs.
• Dress up clothes.
• His favorite books right now.
• His Little People pirate ship and airplane.
• The art easel, coloring books, and crayons.
• His guitar and ukulele.
• And the ten stuffed animal friends we had agreed upon previously.
• The Cat Car RC.
• Toy vacuum.

He does also have a reading chair and the bean bag filled with his other stuffed friends in his room but those will always stay. The bean bag is actually one designed to hold stuffed animal and is easy for him to open to swap them out. We have established some rules recently about only having ten out at a time to keep the mass amount of stuffed animals at bay. It really made the room appear way neater with them all put away out of sight. Then there are the 2 giant stuffed animals and his electronic green scout dog that he has loves since he was an infant. Little Miss has one of her own that is purple.

Incredibly they were so much more calm after the room was cleared.

It’s amazing how much of a difference that made to the feeling in the house. Since I finished, it has been so much calmer and under control than before. Even the kids’ behavior has improved and they have been more willing to play independently than before. It was definitely worth dealing with before anything else. Now I’m more motivated to attack the rest of the house.