Toy Organization: Buckets of Fun!

My toddler is two. The baby is four months old. Yet somehow they have accumulated an impressive collection of toys, scattered so thickly on the dining-room-turned-play-room floor that I was in danger of breaking my ankles at just the thought of entering that room.

Don't get me wrong  - I don't a mind a little disarray. After all, it's a space for kids. And it seems like exploration and imagination are just no good to children unless its accompanied by loads of wonderful, glorious messiness!!! So for the majority of the day, the toy room is under Little People Management.  And at the end of the day, Mommy (that's me) wants to restore a little order to the black hole of play things, sippy cups, shoes, and anything else we might actually want to use in other parts of the house.

And so, I began keeping an eye out for simple ways to loosely organize the room so that my toddler could actually find things without me. It also had to be simple enough for him to begin to learn how to put things away.

I was flipping channels one day and landed on a reality show about a family with eight small children - this house had the mother load of toys! While I wasn't that interested in the show, I noticed they installed a wonderful shelving system with colored bins that looks very similar to the cubbies at our son's daycare.  When I can afford the investment, and take the time for the three hour drive to IKEA in Chicago or Detroit, I will install those same awesome shelves. 

But in the meantime, I still needed something, anything . . . because I'm pretty sure the toys were partying, mating and multiplying during the night.  And as much as I'd like to be a relaxed, 'go with the flow' kind of mom, I'm just not cut out for toy Bacchanalia.

While shopping for recycling bins, I saw these large, brightly colored plastic buckets with rope handles. Perfect for toys in so many ways:  They're big. They're lightweight and can go from room to room. They have large openings for kids to easily rumage through or throw toys into when it's time for clean up. They can be repurposed elsewhere in the house when they are no longer needed for toys. And they were $5 each on sale (at Lowe's.)

In 10 minutes, the entire floor was cleared up with plenty of room for playing and horsing around.  I divided the toys into groups, and put some picture labels on them (obtained from the clip art section in Microsoft Word 2010.)  The labels serve two purposes: 1) they'll come in handy later when I'm ready to work with my toddler a little each day on putting things away.  2) I use the words and pictures as a learning tool for reading, similar to the concept used in "Your Baby Can Read." 

After Teddy goes to bed and the baby has been fed, I gather toys from around the house, throw them in their bins, remove items that dont belong, and forget about it. 

Lots of room to play. . . . for now!

The room rarely looks this put together, but sometimes it does.