Crawling Baby Causing Chaos - help!

[Mo2]

DS2 has just started crawling and World War 3 has broken out in our household...

All of DS2's (3.5 year old) toys are now readily accessible and he's now getting stroppy that DS1 is trying to play with them.(even though he's normally quite good about sharing his toys).

I'm also concerned 'cos so many of them are clearly 'unsuitable' with lots of little pieces (think 'choking hazard' )But it just seems impractical/impossible to put them all out of reach?

Also, how do you handle the transition from "but they're MY toys" argument from the elder child to "now you have to share"? I'm not going to go out and buy more brio/cozy coupe cars / toy cars garages etc, so unless DS1 shares, DS2 will have no toys!

I thought about having a 'handover of old toys to your younger brother' in return for some new ones approach?
Any advice or experience?

Does DS1 have his own bedroom? If so have a toybox in there for his toys that are unsuitable for DS2, and special ones he won't share.

Keep out the brio and stuff tho for both of them

Agree with Easy . We keep "communal " toys in lounge ie Duplo, train set, then specific or less suitable toys are in the bedroom. It works less successfully now that dd is older (almost 2) plus we live in an apartment so bedrooms are easily accessible, but she has yet to be able to open the door if ds is playing a game with say, Playmobil or Brio. Also in the lounge we keep a basket of toys for dd, many of which were passed on from ds and he has never had a problem with this (similar age gap). Ds now accepts dd sharing many of the toys in his room and they will often play restaurants or shops together there, but if he wants to play on his own we withdraw dd as it is his space.

Hope this helps

We used the play pen. For the oldest ... if she wanted to do something which involved small bits or was playing with something she didn't want baby to get hold of we offered her the playpen. she loved it! She'd do bead threading and jigsaws in there.

We told no1 that no2 was 'borrowing' his toys, just like he borrows books from the library and then returns them. He loved the idea and kept bringing toys to 'lend' them to dd. Now he refers to the toys that he had shown no interest in for a year, but NEEDED as soon as dd held them, as 'her' toys. We also don't allow snatching, if he wants a toy that dd has, he has to bring another in exchange. Hopefully, once dd is crawling, we'll still be able to do this!