Organizing tips from Tommie #3...kids toys

Stella asked, "How about the kiddos? What tips do you have to organize their stuff? "

First, I am so glad to be out of the age where they were in exersaucers, swings, tummy time mats, etc. We do have some toys in the living room, but not so many that it is overwhelming. I am assuming Stella meant toys. If you meant clothes or closets or something else, let me know. I am not saying I am an expert on organizing, but this is what works for us.

To keep the interest of the toys at hand, I rotate the toys. I have three bins of toys (stored in the garage), as well as the ones in the house. I have them set up in "themes": 1. Planes, trains and automobiles, 2. dinosaurs, ABCs, and barnyard 3. (the one in the house now) is colors, numbers, shapes.

I have two bookshelves in the living room. The bottom half is for the kids. These baskets have some of the toys from the colors, numbers, and shapes bin. The blue thing on the upper left if a puzzle stacker. I used to be a teacher before kids. I got that from some teacher supply catalog. The only thing I don't like about it is that puzzles with pegs don't fit in it. That shelf is deep enough though that the ones with pegs can be stacked behind the stacker.

edited to add: The baskets are the Sabrina baskets. The cubbies are from Target. I put those together myself....so they are pretty easy if you have an electric screwdriver. The pink and green buckets are actually from Walmart. They are a bit sturdier than the ones from Target. (Though Target has some leather ones now, that I would love to get for the office/playroom.)

I am almost embarrassed to post this pic above. Once I took it, I realized I really need to dust down there! Oh well, this is the true blue me....but you know as soon as I saw it, I had to clean it!! More toys from the colors, numbers, shapes. The basket on the bottom holds things that are so large they don't fit in the baskets. This time it is filled with a bunch of those Leapfrog toys...the Tad, Lily, ABC Caterpillar, some ABC bus thing.

That is all of the toys in the living area. They do have some in their room.....

Livi has a bigger closet than Will does, so she has two of these cubby things. Each bucket holds one group of toys: dress up clothes, babies, Cinderella toy, CareBear stuff, hats, Dora stuff, Miss Spider toy, and doll clothes. Off to the right are two bins: one for clothes I buy a season ahead. The other bin is for clothes that are too small. We send these to a cousin. Once the bin gets full, I bag it and put it in the attic. Off to the left is a basket of stuffed animals. I really want to get rid of them, but can't bring myself to toss them yet!

Will closet is a bit smaller, so his cubby is smaller. His mainly has dinosaurs, cars, boy stuff. I just noticed he has a blue bucket in here. These are the same sized as the ones from the art stuff in the office . So he must have traded one of the "projects" in there for one of his in his room. The baskets in the living room also fit in their cubbies in their closets.

The thing I like best about using the cubby system is even as young as one and two, they are able to put stuff back in the buckets. We try to only have one bucket per kid out at a time. It doesn't always work that way, but we do try.

Finally, for things that need to be hung up, I love those hooks by 3M that have the removable adhesive. We have two of these hooks on the back of the door in their rooms.

My last little piece of Tommie tips: I am a firm believer in "One toy in, one toy out"....meaning every time the kids get a new toy, one gets donated to the cousins or Goodwill. They have to decide where it is going to "live" <-----which bucket it is going to go into, or which bin it will go into if they want it to go into the toys that get rotated. We change out the toys every three weeks or so. I can usually tell when they are bored with the ones in the living room, so we drag the next one out and do a switcheroo!

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