The toy library

I was losing my mind.  The toys, there were so. many. toys!  The babes actually don’t have THAT many toys, but I always feel like we are just drowning in toys.  And this was even after I had organized all of their toys into nice little baskets.  Although the baskets made the playroom look better, it also hid the toys, so the babes sort of forgot about many of their toys. At least I’m assuming that’s what happened since I noticed that many of the toys weren’t being used.  

Anyway, so a few weeks ago I decided to try a new idea: create a toy store where the babes could “buy” toys and then trade them in for other toys. The babes thought it was a pretty good idea, but then they suggested making it more like a library, where they have library cards and can check out toys. That sounded good to me, so we got to organizing the toys. The first step was to go through the toys and get rid of stuff that was never used. We agreed to give the toys away to people who didn’t have any or many toys.

Once the toys were separated into “give away”

and “keep” piles, we set to organizing the “keep” toy by category.

We then made boxes for each category and labeled them.

They are now stashed away in DH’s office where the babes will be able to check out one box at a time. Once they are ready for something else, they bring the box back and get a new box. I should mention that there are still plenty of toys in their playroom. All of their kitchen stuff is out, as well as the legos, blocks, trains, puzzles and books. The library toys are just a supplement to the everyday toys.

We’ll see how it works out.