Tuesday, January 6, 2009

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.

7 comments:

Kim @ Homesteader's Heart said...

Great tackle. I am tackling every room in the house. Last week was toys and the garage.So I posted about it this week. The kids bookshelf looked just like your before lol. I need to work on that still.
Kim

Jodi said...

Great tackle!! I will be working on our bedrooms over the next few weeks as well.

Deb said...

The PopOnz are constantly being played with (and I can ALMOST fit them all in the suitcase if I really try hard), and Baby Jaguar is being quite well 'mothered', lol. She was feeding him a bottle yesterday. :)

I still have to go through the other blocks though, they're still sitting in the bag in the kitchen (sigh). You motivated me the other day when you dropped them all off - I got Hannah and Becca's closet completely re-organized (at least the toy part of it anyway). :)

Courtney said...

We did our toy weeding about 2 months ago in preparation for Christmas. We always do it right before Christmas and birthdays. It fills back up so quickly though!

Veronica @ Luv My Quiver Full Of Arrows said...

You did a GREAT job!!

Yep, I also tackled the toy situation after Christmas. The boys are pretty used to it now, because since we moved up to the mountain, our space is much more limited, so we have to purge every so often. Their 'buddy' situation can also be that of, "But, I love him, MOM!!!" It is hard to have a 'friend' go...but, when I explain it is going to another little boy or girl that could love their 'buddy' they perk up.

xoxo,
Veronica in CA

Susie said...

Great tackles!

bethn said...

I did the toy clear out before CHristmas. I make the boys get rid of a bunch of stuff to make room for new things. I also really go through and get rid of things anytime we have playgroup since all of the toys are scattered everywhere then anyways. I like that Noah really got into helping. Sometimes the challenge really brings out the cleaner in my boys too.