The Big Toy Clean Out

The toy rotation policy has always worked well for us, keeping toys up in the loft and changing them over when the boys get bored of the current ones. There has been a wee problem though, in that sometimes bits get put in the wrong box, and then you find you try and set something up, only to find that you are missing pieces. With this in mind, I thought that just before Christmas, we'd get ALL the toys down and sort them out.

So it was that Adrienne lowered the loft ladder for our assault on the Big Toy Clean Out. Adrienne, with the assistance of two eager boys, passed all the boxes down to me, where I tipped them out onto the playroom and kitchen floor. When they came down, the look on Adrienne's face was priceless, as I think Adrienne had no idea that they had that many toys.

So we set out lines of empty boxes, so that we could sort through the toy mountain and try and put the correct toys into the correct boxes. We had boxes for Lego, plastic building blocks, wooden blocks, Playmobil, Planet Protectors, Thomas The Tank Engine, Hot Wheels, Play Doh, Mr. Potato Head, toy soldiers, kitchen/food toys, Imaginext toys, pirate and knights, animals, action/superhero figurines, marbles, big cars, airplanes/space toys and dress up items.

Adrienne is not good at clearing items out, whereas I can be ruthless and have no qualms about throwing stuff into the recycling/charity boxes. I'm just not sentimental like that, which is strange for such a sensitive soul as me!

So yeah, we are about 80% of the way through sorting them out. We would have finished earlier, but Adrienne was too overwhelmed by my cold blooded approach, to help at the end. I'll finish the rest tomorrow, with the six boxes of recycled toys, reaching about eight full boxes hopefully. And Jarvis will be fine with it, as I've told him that the more toys we get rid of, the more new toys we can replace them with.

House Dad.