Lately I’ve been trying to be more organized. I’ve also been working on keeping the house CLEAN. The kids are actually pretty good a picking up their toys when asked. Before I just didn’t expect them to and was too tired/frustrated to pick up after them ALL THE TIME, but now for some reason it seems do able.  It was really frustrating before because we live in a small apartment and there’s just too much stuff. Hence the getting organized. It’s difficult for me to keep things neat when there’s just too much stuff and not enough places to put them. So I got rid of a lot of my children’s toys and kept only the ones that I still see them playing with. They’ve seemed to have out grown a lot of them. I also stashed away a lot of the singing battery operated toys and I figured I’d rotate them every month or so. Here a few things I bought to get more organized.

1. A small book shelf $18-

2. A pop up hamper $5

3. Clear plastic storage bins. $3

4. A small dry erase board for the refrigerator. $6

We used to just dump all the kids toys in a large plastic bin, but the problem with that is when they look for a toy they pull everything out and all the toys seem to end up everywhere on a daily basis. So I decided to go with a bookshelf that way their toys are displayed and they can just pull the one they want off of the shelf. I got a pop up hamper to store light stuff that doesn’t really do well on shelves mainly all my daughters “babies” (stuffed animals) and this huge collection of balls that we’ve accumulated. I picked up a few clear storage bins with lids for my kids marble run toy and all the tiny nik naks. I specifically got storage containers with a lid because I want my son to ask me before playing with the marble run toy. I’m the one building it anyway so when he wants to play with it I build him a nice little track and when he’s done we clean it up and put it away together. The lid prevents him from randomly dumping the whole thing out on the floor every ten mins, because while it’s very amusing to him it’s not so much for me. I think he likes the loud crashing noise. The dry erase board is just for me it’s handy to write little reminders. I write my “things to do reminders” and I use it to build my shopping list. When ever we run out of something I add it to the board. Then when it’s time to go shopping I don’t forget anything .

Now that I’ve purged their toys and made some room here are some of the things my kids (3 and 19 months) are really interested in right now that I want to get more of.

1. puzzles

2. building blocks or legos

3. books

4. coloring books

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