Organization!

The new influx of toys into our house at Christmas created a few problems around the house.  There were so many toys with different pieces and they were all getting mixed up and bothering me.  Sometimes the mixing was accidental but most of the time it is a how many things can I get out of the toys closet and dump on the floor type of mixing.  The kids didn’t seem to notice.  As I get older I am finding that I am a little particular about keeping the toys organized.  It drives me crazy if a piece of a toy set is missing or a piece of a puzzle or game.  Part of it is because I don’t want a game or puzzle to be ruined if it is missing pieces.  The other part is that some of the toys, games, etc have small pieces and I have to keep track of them to make sure Joel or Cecilia did not eat them.

Normally I can keep my cool and I don’t drag everyone into my crazy, frantic search for the missing piece.  However on one occasion this Christmas season I may have borderline tortured my family with finding 3 missing pieces of our advent calendar.  Our advent calendar I got last year and it has soft pieces that you hang on a cute tree each year.  In my mind it was something that we would have forever and would become a tradition around our house.  I didn’t want the tradition to include missing pieces, but I also didn’t want to never let the kids touch the advent calendar either.  

The advent calendar

One Saturday we had a sitter over to watch our kids and the Crawford kids while all of us adults went out to go shopping.  Later that night I noticed that there were a few pieces of the advent calendar missing.  As I looked around the house I found one piece and figured that the others couldn’t be that far away.  I made Brad and the kids look for the two missing pieces and we couldn’t find them.  As a matter of fact it was two days before we found them in very strange places like the lego bin or attached by velcro to a stuffed animal.  I have to admit I was actually a little crabby until we found the pieces to the advent calendar.

Anyway, to avoid another couple crabby days I went to the store and bought a lot of clear plastic containers of various sizes and almost every toy we have now has a new home. I even labeled the containers and then I realized I was the only one out of the 4 of us that could read.  I need to work on putting picture labels on the containers.  The kids are only allowed to have one container each out at a time.  It has helped a lot getting the kids to clean up and has helped a lot with Joel getting overwhelmed and just dumping out all the toys.  The only problem we have now is that the containers make a perfect ladder in the toy closet for Joel to climb the shelving.  I am working on a new plan for that!