Help! The toys are closing in on me.....

[susannahmoodie]

We have just come back from a week in a holiday cottage. Our 2 ds, aged 3 and 1 had a box of farm animals, an ikea road map mat and some vehicles and they were happy as larry playing with them all week

. now back at home we have approx 30x that amount and I've realised just how ridiculous it is.especially with ds bday and christmas coming up. But I don't know where to start with it. Do I chuck out ruthlessly? Rotate? I like the idea of rotating but I don't think I'm organised enough for it. I've read that magic of tidying book but she didn't have a section on toys and I struggled to take her seriously when she said she felt sorry for her balled socks

Any tips?

We have open shelves - 2.5 billy bookcases. 99% of the time they play with what is on them. When I notice something hasn't been touched for a while I might eventually get round to rotating it off the shelves. We have other stuff stored away in an expedit. But I found that they are happier with 4 games to choose from than 20. I absolutely love the open shelves for forcing me to limit the number of options, and for the way they get so much more use of their toys. There are downsides. The shelves look much less tidy than piling everything into bins and boxes, and I am always slightly embarrassed when people see our playroom with a whole wall of toys! It's actually about the amount that would fit in 4 expedit cubes, so a lot less than most people have.

I definitely think you can have too much. We halved the amount of wooden train tracks and it gets a lot more use. I think it's because it's easier to deal with now. But Christmas and birthdays are going to be a huge challenge!

"We halved the amount of wooden train tracks and it gets a lot more use. I think it's because it's easier to deal with now."

Ah erin99, but pre-halving, had you divided the vast amounts of track into separate open-topped boxes for straights/curves/points/raised track/bridges - that makes it much easier to play with... oh wait, yeah... ummm... I so need to do the halving thing.

:) nah, whatever works for you... I am just a lazier tidier upper than you and your DC leeloo.

We had a load of gubbins that wasn't played with much in there - trees, houses, station building blocks.

Marking my place for others tips!

Lol, erin I've been reading/posting on the magic of tidying thread, so I definitely think I need to get rid of some toys, as I'm coming to realise that just because toys are 'tidy' (and lovely) doesn't mean that there aren't way too many of them.

OP, I agree, I think too many toys can be overwhelming. I find it incredibly hard to know what to get rid of, but am working really hard to be ok with clearing out toys that are 'quality' (e.g. not plastic tat/broken and that were expensive), but that become clutter/dross because we just have too many of them.

I think once I have less toys then rotating them won't be so hard to organise.

Hopefully helpful links (my open tabs at the moment):

best types of toys

toy rotation

more toy rotation - lots more helpful things on this website too. :)