Tackle It Tuesday: Messes in the Bedroom

I tackled two problems tin the bedroom last week.

The problem with Christmas is that kids get STUFF.

In past years, the STUFF the kids got for Christmas was pretty big, and it sent me to Target in search of bins to keep the STUFF in.i.e. legos, game pieces, Little People pieces, etc.






This year, the STUFF was littler, so I couldn't justify buying a whole bunch more bins. Instead, my thought was, "Let's just sort out the stuff we don't use and reuse those bins.

So without warning the boys on New Year's Day, I went to work. The first thing I did was tell Aaron to pick up his books.

This was his idea of "picking up"


Believe it or not, this is actually an improvement on before he went into the room.









At least he tried, so I shooed him on his way, feeling good that I at least made him help. I re-picked up and ended up with this:














How long it will stay this way remains to be seen.

I don't have a before shot of the wire shelves before the weeding, but I will say that it involved taking two bags of toys and a stuffed animal that Deb's daughter Becca has always loved to their house. I knew they would play with them and it made much more room on the shelves.















The best tackle however, was quite a feat and one I am proud of.

An ongoing problem in any home with children is the stuffed animal overload. I am not talking about the problem of what to do to get rid of them, I am talking about the first problem of weeding them out. Any time the moment for weeding begins, EVERY "buddy" (what our boys call stuffed animals) is officially their favorite.

We have tried everything for these buddies....
A. The ceiling corner net- doesn't work because the kids want to play with them
B. The net stacker that hangs down from the ceiling-doesn't work because the hole
openings aren't big enough for the buddies
C. A big pop-up basket- see below...



















So I brought the boys into the room to show the problem. We have so many buddies, that there wasn't even any room left in the hamper, so they were spilling out all over. I told them that the task was to end up with less buddies than it takes to fill this hamper.

This is what I told them:

"You may each pick out your five FAVORITES and I will start sorting after that. At first they panicked thinking I was going to get rid of things they wanted, but then Noah got into it BIG TIME. He was actually having fun looking at every single one and making a choice. And some of the choices surprised me.



















He not only sorted them out into what should be kept and what shouldn't, he wanted to keep going into the other rooms where there were buddies and sort those out as well.

Do you want to see the finished buddy basket?



















And the boys have played with the remaining buddies every day since. I think they were happy to have the "bad" ones weeded out.

(Of course, Monday afternoon, Noah came home with a new buddy, a stuffed animal; Clifford that his teacher had given him as a Christmas present. They just keep multiplying!)

I overrode one of Noah's decisions however....

I did not weed out Karina Gayle, my Cabbage Patch Doll from when I was 9.... no matter how hard Noah tried.

Did anyone else tackle the toy dilemma this week?

Let me know.