To hide all the toys

[chompinglettuce]

I am tired, very tired. 2 young DC who, despite my best efforts to streamline have a vast mountain of toys, with an increasing number of tiny tiny pieces. They are not good at tidying up after themselves at all. Everyday this week by the end of the day I can barely see the floor. It is then an hour battle to attempt to get them to tidy just a small part of it. And lets face it young kids are crap at tidying even when they do it so there is still a mountain to do after their halfhearted attempt. I can't keep the place even vaguely clean as I spend all my time tidying.

Today I have had enough. While DH puts them to bed I am gathering up all their toys except for 2 (well 2 categories, lego and teddies). The rest are going into boxes to be stacked precariously in the spare room. I don't intend to throw them away or anything mean, I just need a few days break from cleaning up crap all day long. AIBU?

I totally sympathise with you. Do it.

Could you consider toy rotations going forward? Might be worth a go rather than bringing it all back, swap things in and out and ration what’s available..?

YANBU, 4 & 2 year old here and completely sympathise. It. Is. Relentless.

Toy rotations all the way- group them and stash them out of reach and then you can produce “new” toys and rotate out others every few weeks.

Also get rid of any tiny plastic crap (bar Lego) on the basis that ain’t nobody got time for that. And ask family to give books/jigsaws/clothes if there’s a need for presents.

I tend to hold on to “for the charity shop” toys in a bag out of sight for a month or two lest one of the DC suddenly notice its absence and throw a wobbly. Bit if it’s not noticed then on and out it goes.

@LazJaz yes I'd love to, it would definitely be more sensible. We used to do this, but have moved recently and don't have any storage at the new place (it needs totally renovating), so it's hard to find places to put things, apart from the precarious stacking of moving boxes in the spare room (which unfortunately isn't really a spare room as it's tiny and DH works in there). Once the house is sorted I'll be doing this (and carrying on getting rid of some of the endless toys!).

@RedLemon I do the same thing with having a charity shop bag hidden in the bottom of their wardrobe and give what they don't notice. How the toy collection still seems to grow is beyond my comprehension -thanks grandparents-.

Deffo rotate them. Without any warning, when they're in bed, stash a whole 1/3 of their toys away in the shed, garage, at the in-laws or somewhere. When you then take the next 1/3 away and the previous 1/3 returns they will be thrilled with their "new toys"! That's what we used to do. Worked a treat.

Toy rotation for sure.

But also they definitely aren't too young to learn to put something away before getting the next thing out.

It is 10am and the kids haven't noticed that 90% of their toys are missing yet. I might be donating quite a few of them to the charity shop in a few weeks time!

Yes, go for it!

For lego set out a sheet/old table cloth/cheap shower curtain for them to play on. Easy to bring corners together in a moment and ‘dump’ it, all in one, in one of those flexi plastic buckets.

I had this when DS' toys were downstairs. Now he has them stored in his bedroom in an IKEA Kallax. Yes his bedroom gets messy but I can shut the door to that. I allow 1 kallax box downstairs at a time.

We have a box for each category. They can only get one box out when the other is packed away. Simple.

Donate 20% - like you say, you haven’t space and they don’t miss them. Someone else will really appreciate them

Get baskets with lids. Lob stuff in and lid closed. Tidy

Introduce ‘tidy up time’. Ideally before lunch and before bed. So they (with help) help tidy up the majority.

Have some baskets of stuff out of reach to just rotate or bring out under supervision

I'm in awe of those of you that manage to have a working system which doesn't require much effort. We've tried the only having one box out at a time, but they tend to play across categories. The toy insects will live in the lego house, requiring the playmobil plane to get to the sylvanian family town. You get the picture...! But I do clearly need to get them to work harder on tidying up. Somehow.

If they play with a mixture, just store more mixed up but less of it. Take half of each category and away to rotate back in next month maybe.

We have an ottoman bench that works well. There are little baskets within it or you could have basket of sylvainians, basket of insects, basket of lego. You aim for them to all go back in right baskets within ottoman, but it’s fine if it gets mixed up and just sort through every so often

We used to have that battle until we started asking if they were going to tidy up or if we were going to put them in the bin. Didnt take long for tidying to stop being an arguement.

YANBU, and I really recommend Minimal Mom on youtube's playlist on toy simplification - you've practically already started her method of picking a handful of categories, have containers that limit how many per category, considering how much would you feel comfortable having them clean up by themselves if they dumped everything. I find it a lot easier than rotation with my four than any sort of rotation. Also, her video on clothes was really helpful for me.

Thanks @BiBabbles I'm going to look at that this evening. Today was lovely with much less tidying needed, so I clearly need to do something.

I started throwing away everything that wasnt tidied up properly at bedtime when my kids were 3 and 4.
I gave them a warning that we are going to bed soon and they need to tidy up everything they want to keep. After i threw away a couple of things they got it and now at 5 an 7 years they dont even need a reminder at night. As soon as i tell them its bedtime soon they go and clean up all their stuff.
They are pretty organised in general though. I always taught them to tidy up their toys before they ply with something new so that they dont have too much stuff out at night.

Do it. At 2&4 they won't miss. Plus too many toys - the harder for kids to concentrate.

How old are they? We don’t have huge amounts of free space but 1) DD (3) tidies up before bed every night 2) I think really hard before buying toys with lots of tiny pieces 3) we have this large trunk-shapes canvasy thing from Ikea that holds a lot of toys, and others stored in her toy kitchen.

Slight update. The toys are still hidden. Kids have only halfheartedly asked for one or two bits since I took them away. The house is much tidier and I am less stressed. We are having a sort out in a couple of weeks to go through the hidden toys properly and decide what stays (in storage at least to come out in a few months) and what goes. Kids are onboard so far as we have promised them a day out with the proceeds of any toys that sell.

@BiBabbles thank you so much for the recommendation! I found it really helpful, and am following a lot of the tips on there to make the process a bit easier. I genuinely wish i'd done all this a long time ago. I'm hoping in a few weeks we'll have a much more organised house and we'll all feel better for it.