The toys are officially PURGED!!!

Yesterday was a rough day. I woke up in a "blah" mood and stayed that way pretty much all day. The kids and I got on each other's nerves and, well, it just wasn't a good day.

So last night I hunted around for some ideas of things to do with the kids to make today a better day. I even wrote them down. My kids love projects, any kind of project, so my list had a couple of "go to Home Depot" type projects too.

This morning, the kids got up, dressed, ate breakfast, and we started our first project: purging the toys from the playroom. We started with stuffed animals. I told them all to go downstairs and each choose ten stuffed animals they wanted to keep, and the rest we were going to give away.

Guess what? They actually did it! Who knew? They were excited to go through all the stuffed animals and put them in the give away bag. I rescued a few more sentimental ones to add to the ones they had chosen to keep, so we're probably still upwards of 50 stuffed animals (where do they all come from?!), but still, we filled a large lawn/leaf trash bag with stuffed animals to donate.

Then we moved on to the assorted "bins" of "stuff." My playroom at one point was fairly organized and almost everything had its own place. But over the past six months, with Carmen being here to help keep things tidy, but not knowing where anything goes, we had accumulated about 3 or 4 bins' worth of "stuff" with no homes. So next we dumped out all the bins and had a go at the "stuff."

I filled a tall kitchen trash bag with "stuff" that we no longer need but that wasn't really fit for donating. Everything else got a home.

We tackled the bookshelf and donated some baby-ish books that the girls no longer use. We tackled the play house and organized all the baby-doll stuff and the kitchen food and cooking utensils.

We even tackled the girls' bedrooms, finding homes for all the stuff in there too.

The only thing left to do, playroom-wise, is the dressup closet. I put all these neat hooks on the wall inside the closet, but somehow everything has wound up on the floor of the closet. We also have a lot of dressup accessories that need a home, but I've got a set of wire-mesh shelving that I will re-purpose to hold those. Hopefully I'll get to it tomorrow.

It feels very good to have that done (it's needed doing for a long time now!). Tomorrow we are tackling Miss-D's closet, putting two low-hanging closet rods in there so that she can reach all her clothes that are hung up. While we're at Home Depot getting that stuff, I will also pick up a bunch more Sterilite box-container-thingies. I'm finding them so useful for storing stuff in a way that the girls can find it.

If I really get organized tomorrow, we will take pictures of the things where they go, print them, head off to Staples to have them laminated, and then hang the pictures in the spot where the toys go. This should help immensely with the "I don't know where it goes" response to "clean up the playroom!"

Oh, and the girls all want haircuts tomorrow too. I can't believe tomorrow is already the last day of our Presidents' Week break from school. The girls are ready to go back to school, but I have to admit it has been nice having them home and not having to be anywhere first thing in the morning!

Perhaps I'll have pictures of the newly-purged playroom for tomorrow.