Toy joy, Oh boy!- January 5, 2012
Two months ago our child was a baby with a small, but quality collection of toys and books. After her first Birthday and second Christmas a mere 7 weeks apart, she’s a baby/toddler hybrid with every beeping, singing, blinking, plastic, plush plaything you can buy a child.
I’m grateful to our generous family and friends, but short of tearing up the floorboards in our house, I’m not sure where to store all of this. The pink and purple princess Kozy Koupe courtesy of Grandaddy presents quite the storage snafu.
Her feet barely touch the ground and we have to help her in and out. Yet, somehow she still manages to be hell on wheels. She loves this thing! Fred Flintstone’s got nothing on my kid!
This face makes my heart swell so much I could probably stuff some rogue toys in it. But, parents, seriously, what do you do with the toy excess? Where do you put it? When is it too much?
Spread it around:
It's funny that you've written this because I've got a post on my dashboard right now about this very thing, but I keep revising it, sugar-coating it, etc. because I don't want to seem ungracious to those who bought my kids toys.
What we're personally doing about it is finishing our third floor to turn part of it into a playroom where hopefully the toys can stay as opposed to being strewn all over the house.
The other thing I do is a toy purge right before Christmas where I secretly go through the toy boxes and throw out/give away toys that Will hasn't played with. This is trickier now that John is right behind him because some of the younger toys are now appropriate for John and therefore remain in our house.
I have other ideas, but they'll be in the aforementioned potentially controversial post about giving gifts to children to be published in the next week or so. Good luck… I wish I could tell you it gets better.
We are finishing our third floor too, for the same reason. My current office on the second floor will become a playroom and I'm moving my office up a floor. Until that's ready, our living room looks like a ToysRUs outlet. We try to keep it semi-contained by throwing most of the clutter toys into big buckets at the end of the day. A few toys are stashed in a storage ottoman. And the big stuff just kind of hangs out against the walls when not in use.
There are large plastic bins in my laundry room that are storage for toys. I put stuff in there as it gets on my last nerve or when there are too many new things at once, then swap them out when the box starts getting full. Its also a handy way to make things "disappear" (aka be donated) when they are outgrown. We also stash big stuff under the house…..good luck!