Toy Organization and New Policies

As Christmas approaches each year I start to panic about the influx of new toys.  Even with regularly going through and weeding out broken and unused or unwanted toys I feel like, with 4 little kids, the amount of toys and therefore the potential for enormous messes is out of control!

To be fair to my kids, part of the problem is they are GREAT players.  They play with everything and they play together without adult input for most of the day...everyday.  They have great imaginations and great creativity and they are busy busy busy.  So it is hard to say before you take out the lego please clean up the playmobil.....because they are using the lego to build a castle for their playmobil.  And up until now they had access to all of the toys at all of the time.

This house is full of closets.  Plenty of closets and storage everywhere.  But the couple that owned the house before us (the original owners..they built the house) had a thing for jackets and coats it seems.  Every one of the closets in every room of the house had coats in it.  It was comical to us as we toured the house before buying it.  So, none of the closets had shelving for storage...just a bar to hang hangers of coats!

We finally got around to adding shelves to this dining room/toy area closet.  So that many of the messy toys are out of sight, and not accessible without help from me.  In fact I even had Claudio put a lock on the door for me.  So, puzzles, blocks, marble runs, playmobil, lego, action figure dolls, board games, dress up, stuffed animals are all in this closet and I can control the coming and going of toys and better deal with the clean up of one before the check-out of another. 

I am in love with this closet!!!

my beautiful lock!!!

And my beautiful keys for my beautiful lock!!