Spring Organization

I definitely have the spring cleaning and organization bug right now. I was sitting in my front yard looking at the condition of our grass and thinking of how I could get our gardeners to fix it. My to do list is just a mile long and Carl and I are doing what we do every spring, decluttering and selling things off.

The boys have been playing in the closet under the stairs a lot so we got a bunch of bin so they could play easier without getting into stuff. That was the fuel to the flame for me. See I have not liked the way my bin have been sitting in the kids toy shelf. The storage just didn't cut it for me and I knew I needed to fix it. It was just a waste of space because the boxes didn't fit the entire square and with two boys and a birthday coming up we need all the space we can get. I have another use for these bins as toy storage in the boys rooms, but here they will not reside.

So on Sunday night after becoming obsessed with this idea I ran immediately to Ikea to buy the official boxes for our space. (Ikea is 3 minutes away from my house.) I could only carry four so that is all I bought and I am glad I did it that way. The blue all together was too intense so I went back on Tuesday with Elliot and bought four more clear bins and spent Tuesday getting them together. Then I thought to myself, the boys really struggle to find toys with all those boxes, heck I struggle to find things myself and I started organizing.

How do you keep a toy organization consistent you ask, labels. Now if you know me you will realize I struggle with cleanliness constantly and being a Type A personality for organization is not my style. Carl yells at me all the time to create lists and I still don't after almost 8 years of marriage. I just knew we needed to do something so last night I created some labels for our toys and just went with it.

I wasn't sure how this was going to go this morning when I showed the boys. So I brought them over and explained the bins to them. I knew Erik would get it and kind of not care, but I didn't know if Elliot would understand. I guess I under estimated my almost 2 year old.

He instantly saw the symbol of "train" and "car" and start digging and what did he find in there, trains and cars. I think he loves it because now he can find the toy he is looking for instead of giving up. Elliot has been digging in the bins all day and finding what he wants and couldn't be happier. It accomplished exactly what I hoped and now we have organization in the chaos and the boys can choose an activity instead of just grabbing the closest thing.

Just a funny note about the toy organization. Today was the day my cleaning lady came and I try to be good and clean up most of the toys before she gets here so she just does the real stuff. Well I heard Erik dump something out this afternoon and I go and look thinking he emptied a bin. He actually dumped out a brown paper bag filled with toys. I guess my cleaning lady was nervous about putting toys in the wrong spot and just put them there. At least she tried and I didn't have to reorganize a mess.