Creating Time in Your Week - Kids Toys

Creating Time in Your Week - Kids Toys

Aggghhhh!!! Kids toys everywhere. Is this a problem for you too? We have a bustling house with a lot of play and activity all day long. Our daughter is home with us all week, and our son goes to two days of preschool and is otherwise at home with us. All of our kids' play happens in our main living area, which connects to their bedrooms. We don't have a separate toy/playroom. So our kitchen/lounge/dining area looks very hectic a lot of the time. 

To help with this, we have used as many storage options as possible to organise our kid's toys/blocks/books. We were given a nine-hole shelf unit and used more shelves, a large storage ottoman, small bookshelves and a cabinet in our lounge room and the kids' bedrooms. It is always better if everything has a place to be put back. We also bundled up some toys that weren't being played with frequently in big plastic tubs and stored them in our outdoor area. We pull these tubs out on rainy days/sick days, and the kids think it is Christmas, getting to play with so many 'new' toys. 

Another big issue for us was having hats, coats, and shoes lying around everywhere. To combat this, I bought a set of drawers on sale at Mocka, labelled each drawer with big letters from Officeworks and set it up in our lounge room. It has been fantastic to get all those things out of sight and always know where they are. 

I'm still working on getting my kids more involved in packing up their toys, and hopefully, this will happen more as they get older. At this stage, I try to tidy up what I can in the afternoon before preparing dinner, so there is less pack up for my husband and me in the evenings. We enjoy having as much of that time free as possible, so the less tidying then, the better.