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Kids & Toy Management {Episode 23}
127 Plays6 years ago
Where there are kids, there are toys! And they can accumulate quickly, so today's episode is all about managing those toys. The recent Mario Kondo craze and our own desires to bring some order to the toy chaos prompted us to share our thoughts and systems on keeping the toys corralled.
Bonnie recommends: Clutter Free with Kids by Joshua Becker
Audrey recommends: The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Theme
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Outnumber the Podcast. I'm Bonnie. And I'm Audrey. And we're homeschooling moms to a combined total of 18 children. We know firsthand that motherhood is full of crazy chaos and overwhelming obligations, but it should also be full of love and laughter. Regardless of where you are on your journey, come join us as we work together to find joy in the chaos of motherhood.
Managing Kids and Toy Chaos
00:00:31
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 23 of Outnumbered the Podcast. And today we're going to talk about kids and toy management because where there are kids, there are toys. And boy are there ever. And the more kids you have, the more toys you have. Yes. Mm hmm. They're everywhere. So first we're going to start out with a humor segment.
00:00:53
Speaker
I guess my kids say funny stuff all the time or that I just think they're funny or something. But anyway, I was listening to my five year old and this is probably not a recommendation for my homeschooling skills, but I was listening to him. He was singing this little tune and I was enjoying the little tune for a little bit. And then I keyed in on the words and he's singing five plus five is cow pie.
00:01:19
Speaker
I don't even know. Oh, man. So perhaps we need to go back and review some skills with that one. He's learning things about the farm, so that's good, too. I guess.
00:01:39
Speaker
Okay, and I have a review to read for you guys. So this one was left by user Cam Larr, C-A-M-L-A-W-R. Listening to Bonnie and Audrey talk about motherhood feels like you're chatting with good friends about real life. They're honest about the hardships and encouraging about finding ways to overcome those moments when you don't love mothering. Their tips are overwhelming, can easily be done and can actually help. I love that the podcast is 30-ish minutes, not too long and I have to stop and start due to kid interruptions a bunch of times.
00:02:08
Speaker
Thanks so much for that review. I'm so glad that you found our tips helpful. And don't forget to leave us a review if you haven't yet, because that helps us reach a bigger audience via iTunes and help our moms. So thanks so much. Yeah, and we'll continue to be honest about those hardships, right, Bonnie? That's right. We never sugarcoat stuff, let's be honest.
Clutter and Mental Clarity
00:02:29
Speaker
So with the recent Marie Kondo organizing and decluttering craze that's going on, also combined with we've had several listener requests for help from toys taking over, those two things combined and prompted this week's topic.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, you know, my dad used to say this quote when I was a kid, and I forget where he got it from, but he used to always say, everything you own owns a piece of you. And that has stuck with me over the years as I accumulate stuff for the home, household items, clothes, toys, etc., thinking that every time you pick something up,
00:03:02
Speaker
that takes some of your time. Every time you repair something or clean something or wash something, it all takes something out of you. And so in order for us to keep our minds clear and focus on the priorities that we really, really want to keep at the top of our list, we have to watch out that our lives don't get totally overwhelmed with stuff.
00:03:22
Speaker
Oh my goodness, I love that quote. I often think when we're walking in the house and we've got five bags we're bringing in, how many bags did we take out to replace these, to make space for these five bags that are coming in? And often it's none, nothing. Yes, exactly. So we try to find a balance between teaching our younger kids systems and skills for organizing and decluttering and dealing with stuff and respecting our older kids'
00:03:52
Speaker
belongings and spaces.
Toy Overload Strategies
00:03:55
Speaker
So we're gonna split this episode into four parts. Number one, when and how toys begin to take over. That's right, and then number two is gonna be how, what, and when to purge in the toy realm. And number three, organizing what's left after you're done purging. Oh yeah, and then number four, putting in place systems for the future to prevent a future great toy takeover.
00:04:22
Speaker
Oh yes, because otherwise we'll have to move out and find a bigger house for all these kids toys, right? And then be featured on an episode of Hoarders. Nobody wants that. Exactly, yeah. Okay, so let's start with when and how toys accumulate. For us, it's birthdays and holidays. So getting into a little math here, when you have nine kids, if you celebrate
00:04:44
Speaker
two holidays a year, like a birthday and another holiday. And they each get five to six toys or things for each holiday. Doing the math, that's 50 to 100 new things per year. And that's too much. Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous. Seriously. And that's just with us giving our kids a couple of things. If they have a birthday party or generous grandparents, which we do over here, I love my parents and my husband's parents, but we get a lot of stuff and it is so overwhelming.
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah. You know, I was going to mention that when we, I took a little house tour video of our old house right before we packed it up to move, just to kind of remember, you know, what it looked like and how we lived. And I was watching it a couple of months after we moved out. And I remember thinking, how did we live with so much junk? I noticed piles of things everywhere. I noticed toys, and it was actually fairly picked up at the time, but I just noticed stuff everywhere.
00:05:37
Speaker
And I remember thinking, did it always look like that? Because we purged a ton in the move and just how easy it is to let things accumulate, you know? And one time I was getting a little overwhelmed with life, so I hired some cleaners to come in and we had to put away all our stuff, you know, not let any piles be out so that the cleaners could come. And when we walked back into the house after we had done our job and they had done their job, I remember feeling
00:06:03
Speaker
this like actual physical stress being lifted off my shoulders. Like, whoa, I had no idea I was carrying that around because there was just stuff everywhere. You know, sometimes we don't even realize the toll it takes on us. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think I'm kind of clutter, clutter phobic or something where it really, really affects me mentally to have stuff laying around. And I know we talked about in our episode on chores, how we have a four o'clock afternoon shore time.
00:06:30
Speaker
And that kind of helps a little bit that I can let it go, the clutter and the mess that it'll be cleaned up at least once a day at four o'clock. But it does, it does just burden me down in my mind. The more stuff we have, the more weight is on my mind.
00:06:48
Speaker
And then the other thing for us is, like I mentioned in our introduction episode, we live in a three bedroom house with nine kids. And so we physically cannot have too much stuff. And this is by choice. This isn't like, oh, we accidentally had nine kids and moved to do three bedroom houses. This is a choice we've made to live like this. But it does mean that we have to be super conscious about what comes in and what goes out.
00:07:16
Speaker
In our old house, we kind of found ourselves in the same situation, you know, trying to keep things, the things at bay because we didn't have a lot of room. So we moved into this house and purged a ton, but this home is bigger. And so now I have the problem of having space for things, but still not wanting to accumulate them, you know?
00:07:34
Speaker
Like when we first moved in, I remember thinking it's so refreshing to just have white walls and blank space and corners with nothing in it instead of something everywhere you look, you know? And so that's kind of a reverse problem, but the same issue with making sure that the stuff doesn't overwhelm your life.
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah. I think I read that sort of an Eastern medicine thing is to have blank spaces so that your mind has a place to rest. Yes. Yes. And I think that was part of what I noticed when I came home after the cleaners was that, whoa, my mind can rest. It's not constantly taking stock of put that away and get rid of that. And oh, that's the mail I need to do. You know what I mean? It's like a to-do list, but in piles of things. Yeah.
00:08:17
Speaker
So, moving on to number two, about keeping it just to toys. When, what, and how to purge. So, when to purge, we have found it a super good time to purge is like after one of these birthdays or holidays. So, they are all enraptured with the new toys. It's a great time to purge the old ones because they're not as attached. Yeah, great idea. Yeah.
Teaching Decision-Making
00:08:47
Speaker
Also, I wanted to mention that when you are teaching your kids to organize and purge and declutter, you're teaching them the skill of decision-making, which comes straight out of Marie Kondo's book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Part of that is teaching them the skill of decision-making, so they can take this skill of deciding which toys to get rid of and which to keep, and they can apply that to other things, bigger things in life.
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. One thing I noticed in our old home, we had a art wall where we put up everybody's art. So you know, everybody, every mom knows what it's like to have kids come home from school with massive amounts of artwork or papers or projects. And same thing with homeschooling, we're always doing something that they want to display. So we would display their art on this wall.
00:09:35
Speaker
everybody had their own magnet to hang something up. And when they would do a new piece of art, it would go in front of the old. And then when it got so heavy that the magnet couldn't stay up anymore, then we pull all the stuff down and we'd spread it out and we would say, choose your, I think we did two, your two best pieces of work.
00:09:50
Speaker
And when they did that, I was really surprised at how brutal they were at weaving stuff out. I mean, there were things that I thought, oh, this is cute. You don't want to keep this? No, no, no.
Purging Toys Effectively
00:10:01
Speaker
And especially when I phrase it like, is this your best work? And I know this doesn't have to do with toys, but I just bring that up in the fact that kids really can make those decisions. And they can make hard decisions between two toys that they really enjoy. But that's just life. We have to be able to say no to things or else our lives will become so full that we won't be able to prioritize anything.
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, agreed. OK, so as far as what to purge, obviously, when we go through toys, we can get rid of anything that's broken, things that are outgrown. I feel like we always have some baby toys somewhere that nobody's played with for four years. Yeah. Get rid of those. If it is difficult for you or your children to get rid of things, now, side note here, sometimes my kids are like, yeah, I don't want that. And I'm like, no, that costs $60. We're not getting rid of that.
00:10:51
Speaker
Sometimes it's hard for me because I want my kid to enjoy something that I spent time or money on. But if it's difficult for anyone to get rid of, my tip is to put it in a box in the garage for two months. And you can do it a little longer or a little shorter if that works better for you.
00:11:05
Speaker
if after that time period, no one has asked for it, then just donate it. But under no circumstances should you open the box and let kids go back through it because then they want to keep it all. So just keep it in there, maybe mark a date on it, say June 2019. And in August, when you go through, or when you look at it, if nobody has, you don't even have to go through it. When you look at it, nobody's asked for anything from it, just take it to Goodwill or whatever thrift store you like.
00:11:31
Speaker
Yes. And I can relate exactly to what you're saying. And I have to be careful in myself not to teach my kids my own habits, my own bad hoarding habits about what to keep in church. So, like, they'll choose to get rid of something in my
00:11:50
Speaker
got, you know, bad habit is to say, oh, you can't get rid of that. That's a special toy that blah, blah, blah gave to you. I'm like, okay, hang on. You're teaching them bad habits. If they have chosen to get rid of that, let them get rid of it for crying out loud. Right, right. Make sure that your emotional connection to something doesn't affect their decision, right? Yeah, exactly. Yep.
00:12:13
Speaker
So then a little bit on how to purge.
Gift-Giving and Experiences
00:12:16
Speaker
One thing we do is when they're having a hard time, we talk about, okay, we need to get rid of some of this stuff and they're having a hard time with it. So we have physically taken all the stuffed animals and lined them up and said, okay, look, there's 45 stuffed animals here. You can't possibly play with them all. Okay, so choose two, each of you choose two. And that's, you know, the kids that like to play with stuffed animals, that's maybe still five of them.
00:12:41
Speaker
That's 10 that we can keep. I know, I know. But it takes us from 45 to 10. And then we're going to donate the rest.
00:12:50
Speaker
In regards to donating, it can be really helpful to let kids know where your animals are going. So if you donate it to a charity or a thrift store or something, you can say, they're going to resell this to another family that's really looking for a stuffed doggy just like this one. Wouldn't you like to sell it to another little boy who could enjoy it more than you're enjoying it right now? So to give them some purpose in donating, it's not just we're taking this away, it's let's give it some new life.
00:13:18
Speaker
Let's repurpose it and make sure that it's getting loved by someone else. Yes. So I also want to mention that different methods of purging and different ideas work differently with each kid, right? So some of my children can be unusually attached to things. And sometimes I think, seriously, you want to keep this ratty old thing that's broken or ripped?
00:13:40
Speaker
And it can be difficult for me to not, you know, like you mentioned, don't pass on your bad hoarding skills, your bad habits to your kids, but also try not to force them to get rid of something if they're not ready, because then that can actually backfire as well. And later on in life, they can also become hoarders because mom took everything away from them, you know? Oh, yeah.
00:14:01
Speaker
but you can ease them into it by practicing appreciation for events or memories instead of things. So, for example, we have tried to implement more experiences as gifts for birthdays and Christmas versus things. We'll say, okay, these toys, I know you really want them, but what usually happens to a set of Legos, you build it one time and then it gets mixed up in the box, you never see it again, right? Do you really want that?
00:14:29
Speaker
Or should we pool the money we had for gifts and go to the water park? Or should we go on this family outing or something else together so that we can enjoy each other's company and this memory instead of a toy? And that's not going to work for everyone, especially not the under six set. They'll be like, nope, still want the Legos. Thanks.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah. But you can help ease them into that by bringing it up, saying, isn't this a great time that we had going and doing go-karts as a family? It costs a lot of money. Wasn't it fun that we chose to spend our money on this instead of just bringing more stuff into our home that would then get broken or need to be picked up, et cetera? And that can help them to break any dependence on things. And obviously, we have to be an example of this, too. Oh, yeah. Being the example is such a hard part.
00:15:16
Speaker
I have some things that I really need to let go of and be an example to my kids now.
00:15:22
Speaker
So I have the whole gamut of kids too. I have a kid that's very selfish and doesn't want to get rid of anything. I have a kid that's entrepreneur and would get rid of anything he could sell for money. I have a hoarder pack rat child who will go through the box in the garage and take everything out and find somewhere to stick it.
00:15:49
Speaker
And then I have a kid that's a giver. So, for example, one time, I don't know if it was a mistake or not, but I told him a story about, you know, you talked about a kid that was looking for a stuffed animal just like that. I told the kids that we were going to, you know, after we lined up the stuffed animals or what it was, that there were
00:16:05
Speaker
little kids and we're going to take them to a hospital where little kids had cancer and we were going to give them to the little kids that were, you know, suffering in this hospital. And this one child was like, oh, and she boxed up all her toys and she's like, here, they can have everything. Aw, that's so sweet. It's very sweet, but I have the whole gamut too. And so like, just what you were saying, different methods and ideas work with different kids. Yeah, you might have to experiment with each kid, right?
00:16:32
Speaker
Yes.
Organizing Toys Post-Purge
00:16:33
Speaker
So our number three step is how to organize what's left. So you've taken stock of what you've had, you've done the great purge. And now the trick is to keeping things organized and put away where they belong.
00:16:46
Speaker
Right. For me, now Bonnie and I have different systems on this, but for me it doesn't work to buy an organizing system until after I purge because I don't want to, I will over buy and then, you know, fill it up or keep extra things just so that, you know, I have stuff to fill the boxes or whatever. So I don't ever buy my organizing systems or boxes until after the purge is done. Yeah. I actually, um,
00:17:13
Speaker
totally know what you mean here because I've done that as well. But one thing I've learned recently
00:17:17
Speaker
in our new house because we have more space for things. I have actually gone the other route and started choosing storage before we've purged because then I know that I don't want any more things than will fit in that storage. So for example, in our school room, we had some built-in shelves and storage systems put in place. And I said, I want five cubbies for toys, that's it. So they built five cubbies and I bought the little bins to go in them. And then I said, guess what?
00:17:45
Speaker
The toys that can't fit in here are going to Goodwill. So they had to go through everything and only keep the things that would fit in those five bins. So that for me was an example of making sure that we weren't going to let it overwhelm the entire room because we did have a whole room that they could have just stashed toys in wherever spot, but I chose to keep it fairly small. But generally I think you're right. I think that by buying, sometimes I go a little crazy with organizational supplies. Oh, all the plastic boxes and labeling makers and et cetera.
00:18:13
Speaker
Yeah. And then also you're constrained by like the area that you're organizing. So if it's a kid's bedroom in their storage spaces, their closet, then, you know, you're constrained by the space limits there, or if you know, you have a,
00:18:26
Speaker
your home school area and your toy area and your five bins and all that. So that's constraints too. Yeah, and I was also gonna say on the organizational front, to make sure that you're organizing, you make it easy for your kids and your husband to put things away as well. So one thing I've done in the past is organize in such a way that is not very intuitive and is just the way that I think it should be done and then nobody else puts it away that way. And it just makes more work for me. And how dumb is that?
00:18:54
Speaker
I've done that to myself too. Yeah, I've taken to just doing things super simple and labeling the heck out of it so that at one glance, the babysitter can tell this is where the dolls go, or this is where the blocks go, etc. And the other thing I would share with that is if there's something that continually
00:19:12
Speaker
gets dumped out and minimally played with, just get rid of it. So an example is I had these great wooden blocks that I'd bought years ago and they were expensive and they were awesome and they were just this, you know, open-ended play thing I thought the kids would play with a ton and they just haven't. I mean a handful of times they have but they just don't really play with it and yet I just kept holding on to it.
00:19:35
Speaker
for so many years thinking, no, no, no, this is a great toy, this is a great toy. But in the end, I was the only one picking it up. The two-year-old would want to run over, dump it all out, and I'd be over there picking it up again, even though no one had even played with it. So that's just a tip for, you know, don't hold on to things just because you think it's this great idea. When you're the only one cleaning it up and putting it away and organizing it, it's just not worth it.
00:19:56
Speaker
So now we're going to both talk about our organizing systems that we each use to organize the stuff and keep the kids toys under control. So a system that works for us is I like to use clear plastic boxes and I get them in all the sizes that they come in according to the
00:20:15
Speaker
the needs of what's going to go in them. So everything from shoebox size up to your bigger bins for stuffed animals. But I like to do clear because then even kids that can't read
00:20:28
Speaker
can put the correct thing in the correct box and then I put a label on it and the label has both the word and a photo and so I'm like, you know, it'll have stickers and a picture of stickers on it or crayons and a picture of a crayon plus the box is clear. I don't know how much easier it can be than that.
00:20:48
Speaker
One thing I do need help with, though, is oftentimes my kids will lose the lids for the boxes, and I'll have a whole bunch of lids laying around. Or the box will get broke, and the lids won't get thrown away. So we'll have all these mismatched boxes and lids. It's not enough to make me change my system, but it's just a little annoying thing. So if anybody has a tip on keeping boxes and their lids together, send us an email. I need it.
00:21:18
Speaker
Yeah, I love the photo label tip. So I've actually done that with toys, but I haven't done it with other things. And that's genius. So that like, for example, all the colored pencils get dumped out, they can, the two year old can still tell what's supposed to go in that box when it's time to clean up. So I'm going to steal that. Yeah, it's a good idea. One tip that has worked for us is color coding, the things that belong to each kid. So for example,
00:21:40
Speaker
We usually divide our toys by girl toys and boy toys. So we'll usually have a bucket that's like a blue for the boys or a pink for the girls, whatever, just so they can tell at a glance. Sometimes we don't have so many toys that we organize them by action figures, but we might have all the cars, action figures, and play weapons go in the blue bucket, et cetera. Maybe some of the gender specialists wouldn't like that idea, but whatever, that's what we do.
00:22:07
Speaker
Oh man, I can't believe you're going to get us in trouble, Bonnie. I know, I know. Sorry I said that. Hey, we'll talk more about that in our episode on raising boys coming up, right? There you go. There you go.
Living Beyond Clutter
00:22:22
Speaker
Okay, so I did want to share one thing at this point. I read a good book and I'll share the details in a little bit when we talk about recommendations, but it's called Clutter Free with Kids.
00:22:30
Speaker
And he talks about a really interesting experience when he had to organize his garage and his son kept asking him to play ball with him that day and the dad was like, no, I'm too busy. I have to get through the garage. And it finally hit him that he was spending wasting his life that was revolving around things, you know, organizing the garage every Saturday instead of spending time with his kid and that something needed to change. So I just I just like to give myself a reminder that
00:22:58
Speaker
life is not about things, right? It's not about, you know, cleaning up all day long or organizing all day long. And sometimes it's become that way because we live really blessed lives with all the things that we need, right? Most of us have all the things that we need. But if we're going to help pass on healthy behaviors to our kids, then we have to teach them by example that people are more important. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I love that thought.
00:23:25
Speaker
And also, if you're looking for more ideas on how to organize, if you have a particular space, hit up Pinterest. It's a great resource for organizing kids' toys, kids' closets, just get specific in your search terms. And there's some really neat ideas and fun things other people have done. Although, again, your caveat that I could spend hours
00:23:51
Speaker
scrolling Pinterest looking through the organizational ideas and never get to organizing my kids toys. I think that's just an occupational hazard of using Pinterest, right? Well, I now spend two hours that I could have been organizing toys looking for organizational tools.
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah. So sometimes what I'll do is I'll like, okay, pick your top three favorites and like take a screenshot of it or save it to a folder on your desktop and then exit out of Pinterest and look at those three and see what you can take from those three or, you know, make a board all for kids toy storage solutions and put your ideas on that and then pick your top three and narrow it down and then choose one or a couple to go from. But, you know, force myself to make a decision. Yeah, exactly.
00:24:35
Speaker
Okay, so now we're going to try to talk about systems to prevent future toy takeover.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, so we are definitely still working on this work in progress. In the past, we have often asked for no presents at birthday parties, specifically friend birthday parties. And I will, you know, this is difficult for some of the young kids to understand, but I will phrase it in such a way that it looks like this. For your birthday, we're going to have an awesome party and we're going to have a slip and slide or we're going to play at the pool or we're going to take them to an arcade and play video games. And then we're going to get cake and pizza and it's going to be so awesome. But we don't want to distract from the day by
00:25:12
Speaker
making everybody think of a good present for you or something like that, you know, so that you focus on the amazing, fun things they're going to do at the party and make the party or the event the gift. Does that make sense? And focus on the experience instead of, you know, the things, things, things. And I've also found that when kids start to focus on what people are bringing them for birthdays, it often brings up some really icky personality issues like
00:25:43
Speaker
some selfishness, some greediness. I can't stand a child who sits there and opens present after present after present and says, that's it or no more. It just looks so ungrateful and it really irritates me. I don't want my child to end up that person who can't be grateful for what he has and always wants more.
00:26:02
Speaker
I have noticed some of those same things in my own kids too. And I tried to combat that on one of my little kids. It was actually my two-year-old, her most recent birthday. So everybody, we just had a little family birthday for her. There wasn't anybody beside, but our immediate family there.
00:26:20
Speaker
And I noticed, you know, at this age, the kids can get kind of overwhelmed also with all this stuff and forget to be thankful in that. So I said, we're going to do it a little bit differently. And it worked really well. So what we did was each person, normally what we had been doing was the child sat in one place and all the presents were brought to them in a pile and they kind of tried to open them all and figure it out. And, you know, you get that whole, you know,
00:26:45
Speaker
open the next one, open the next one, open the next one without any gratitude
Gratitude and Gift Management
00:26:49
Speaker
in between. And so I said, we're going to do it differently. And what we did was everybody sat around the room in a circle and held their own present that they had for the two-year-old. And the two-year-old could go, went around and picked
00:27:03
Speaker
who she wanted to open their present next. And she sat on their lap and they helped her open the present and they explained it to her, why they got it for her, just spent a little time with her and the present. And it just worked out a little bit better to help her see who gave it to her and to remember to be thankful. It's getting a little bit away from toys, but it was trying to help out with
00:27:29
Speaker
how the toys came in and the gratitude with them. Yeah, I love that. I love that. You could even do that at a regular kids birthday party to have each guest hold their gift and then the child go to the guest and open it right in front of them. I really think that connects them with the giver instead of just
00:27:46
Speaker
gift after gift. The other thought that I had was and we haven't tried this before but I really want to is that I've noticed this specifically at Christmas time when they just get tons of presents from mom and dad or Santa or however you do it and especially the little kids get really overwhelmed and I've noticed how silly it is that they'll open a present and want to play with it and we're like no no no on to the next one.
00:28:08
Speaker
Like, really? Who is shoving stuff at them that they don't even really want. They just want to play with the first dang thing you gave them, you know? So I had a thought that if I just couldn't control myself and I had to buy more than one thing for a child, that I could keep them in a separate room maybe on Christmas morning and bring out one at a time. And when the child was done to be done, it's okay to take a gift back. It's okay to not, you know? Because sometimes it's me. I'm the problem. I just think, oh, wouldn't they love this? And oh, wouldn't they love that?
00:28:37
Speaker
But it's just, yeah, giving them added responsibility of cleaning up and dividing their time. Yeah.
00:28:46
Speaker
Yeah. And then just the last thing about toy maintenance, you don't have to wait for a scheduled big toy purge to get rid of
Toy Rotation System
00:28:54
Speaker
things. So one thing that I start doing is if I start noticing things are out a lot more often than they like them to be, so I'm constantly picking up, constantly picking up, I'll just go through the toys or bedrooms and start picking up things, boxing up things that I haven't seen anyone use in a while.
00:29:08
Speaker
And I'll stick it in the garage, like I mentioned, and just wait and see if anybody asks for it. And if they don't, then off it goes. Sometimes it gets pulled out because it's there and not necessarily because the child has an attachment to it. Right. Yeah. So like I mentioned, we have our daily cleaning at four o'clock and pick things up and put them back where they go.
00:29:32
Speaker
And then we have, on a weekly, we do a bigger cleaning, like Saturdays. We, like I mentioned in our introduction episode, our bedrooms are upstairs. The kids' bedrooms are upstairs. So we clean the upstairs on Saturdays, a deeper clean. And they do need to, instead of just throwing everything in their room like they did all week, they need to actually put it away where it goes so that the floor can be vacuumed.
00:29:56
Speaker
And then a monthly reorganization. We don't do this every month, but if you...
00:30:04
Speaker
If you kind of change things around or reorganize, then it causes you to look at the things again and maybe pull out different things that they haven't seen. And then we do a yearly purge like either on their birthday or this year we're doing it in the summer. We're going through each room and what we do is we take everything out and then look at each thing and only put back those things that really
00:30:28
Speaker
they love. And then one system we have for our school room is that we do a toy rotation for that. So we do this with blocks.
00:30:39
Speaker
and a sensory tub and Play-Doh. And so we do it, we rotate the blocks. So they get one set of blocks for the whole week and they don't get any other other blocks at any other time. So they get Legos for a week. And then after that week, the Legos are put away up out of their reach. And then the next week they get Lincoln Logs for a week. And then they don't get those again for a couple of weeks. And then the next week they get Tinker Toys for a week. And then the next week they get Magnet Blocks. And we just rotate through
00:31:09
Speaker
like five or six sets of blocks, for example, so that they don't get bored. And when they do have the toys sent out, then they don't fight over them and they're more imaginative with them because they haven't had access to them all the time. Oh, yeah, I like that idea. I've tried something similar to that in the past and wasn't efficient enough to get it to work, but I want to try your way. Well, the key is that you have to have the toys like up on a top shelf where they can't reach them and access them all the time. Right. Yeah, exactly.
00:31:39
Speaker
Okay, so just to wrap up, I did have that one recommendation I wanted to share with you guys.
Resource Recommendations and Closing
00:31:44
Speaker
The book is called Clutter Free with Kids, and the author is Joshua Becker. I recommend that one. A lot of really great advice for becoming a minimalist, specifically with kids stuff, because it's very easy to let kids stuff take over your life. So I recommend that read.
00:31:59
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to get that one. And then I know I talk about the Live Free Creative podcast all the time and she is a minimalist and focuses on a lot of these things that we've talked about like experiences over things, less stuff, more adventure is her byline.
00:32:15
Speaker
But I specifically for this episode was thinking about her episode number 13. It's called Tis the Gifting Season, and she did it in time for Christmas last year. But it's very relevant on setting the right mindset for about gifts that people give to kids, which I really needed to hear and was very helpful for me. Awesome. I need to go listen to that.
00:32:41
Speaker
Okay, so that's all our suggestions on organizing with kids toys. And like we said at the beginning, we did this episode partly for ourselves because we're still working on this. It's a constant work in progress, kids and their toys. It's constant organization. Things come in, things need to go out, and we're both still working on it. So if you are too, we're so glad that you've joined us for this episode.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah, and feel free to share any tips you have that you think might help us on our Instagram page, Outnumber the Podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this episode, we'd be so grateful if you'd leave us a written review on iTunes. If you have any questions or ideas for future episodes, you can reach us at outnumberthepodcastatgmail.com and find us on Instagram at Outnumber the Podcast. See you next week.
00:33:41
Speaker
So yeah, let's go ahead. Go ahead. Nope. Nope. Oh, I was gonna say, yeah, we