You may have wondered in
my previous post where all Daniel's toys are, if there aren't any in his room (except for Otter sitting on his bed, but, well, Otter has special privileges). Well, I'll give a hint. They aren't on his toy shelves in the front hallway anymore-
Now looks like this:
And they aren't in my bedroom, the car, the living room, or Camille's room. I have removed every last toy from around the house, and put them all in the guest bedroom (aka Grandma's room.) Then put this on the door:
No, I don't mean it as some sort of severe punishment for Daniel, though I did warn him that whatever toy he did not pick up (ie: all of them), he would lose and have to earn back (he wasn't even phased in the slightest, I don't think he'd even miss the majority of them). Mostly, though, I realized we need to go through a toy detox. Want to see why? K, take a deep breathe, this is gonna get nasty.
And to be honest, I don't think the pictures even do the mess justice. Each bucket/bag in the picture is full of smaller, mostly unrelated toys. Most of the mess was that way before I started bringing in toys from other parts of the house. Daniel goes into the "toy" room and doesn't play, he destroys. Plus, we have a RIDICULOUS amount of toys. We've been the happy beneficiaries of many many hand-me-downs and gifts, and while most of D's favorite toys come from the hand-me-downs, it's just too much for one little boy all at once. A good amount of them are no longer age-appropriate, and he THINKS he likes to play with baby toys but really, he just likes to spread them around and stick them anywhere I'm going to step in the middle of the night when coming to Camille's room for a 2 am feeding. He's neat enough that I think he hates hanging around messy toys, so he ignores most of his toys (especially in his bedroom), but since many toys don't really have an appropriate home yet, there isn't a way for him (or me) to "clean them up". So even the toys he loves, and would probably make good use of, get ignored or used as cannon fodder because there is no comfortable space for him to play with them.
I've tried to organize them so I could store some and/or give some away, but every time I tried before I got anywhere they were a huge mess again. So now he has no access to them and I can work on the pile a little bit at a time, and hopefully teach my son (who in all other aspects is kind of a neat-freak) about storing his toys. Then every few months I can cycle some out of storage so he has "new" and age-appropriate toys.
