So given the fact that there is actually a law out there that says that things are destined to spread out everywhere and make as big a homogeneous mess as possible, what's a mother to do?
The answer: controlled chaos. That's right. We know we can't avoid chaos altogether, but we can hobble it a bit, and make sure it only impacts our lives on our terms. And how exactly do we do that, you may ask? By a little approach I call, "consolidate and camouflage".
In our house for example, all the kids’ rooms are upstairs, but they spend 90% of their time downstairs. So as much as I would like to hide all their toys away in their rooms behind a closed door… it’s not practical. Plus, the boys share a room, and as soon as the little one goes down for a nap, the other will most certainly think of a toy he absolutely has to have that is in his room, which would of course result in his brother getting woken up if he went in to fetch it. Then we have a cranky baby without a nap… and we’re back to chaos.
Also, as much as I enjoy a good stair-stepper workout, after about the 27th time in the course of the day that I would have to run up and down the stairs to either find, retrieve or put away a toy… my kids would have to learn to play with popcicle sticks and cotton balls, and be happy about it. So for many reasons, most of the toys are where the kids are: downstairs in the family room.
Now, on an odd occasion, I like to be able to actually walk across the family room without permanently harming the bottom of my foot by stepping on a toy car or baby rattle. And on even rarer occasions, I might even have company over. You know, a play date for ME. So I need to have a way to store and stash toys away without the first floor of our house looking like a toy store, but still have everything accessible so the kids can get to things (as well as easily put them away!).
So starting with the consolidating part, I quickly fell in love with those big plastic storage bins that you can get just about anywhere. They come in all shapes and sizes, and all have lids (fantastic!). And for all of the big collections of stuff with lots of little pieces, they would just get assigned a bin, and the toys would be dumped right in. We use one for all of the boys’ Thomas train engines and track, another for all of the baby-safe toys, another for legos… and on and on. They get pulled out of the downstairs closet when it’s time to play, and within five minutes they can be used to put toys away and out of sight.
But we don’t have a ton of available closet space, so for other items, we use the camouflage technique. That’s right, put stuff right out there, but make it “blend in” with the décor. A great thing to use for this are a bunch of fabric lined baskets. We use several small ones to store cars, blocks, and small books, and then sit them next to each other on a bookshelf. The kids can just grab the basket with the toys they want to play with, and once again when it’s cleanup time, they just pile them all back in and put the basket back on the shelf. And for all the other leftover toys, we use a big woven trunk as a toy chest. It sits on one side of the room, and the kids drag out what toys they want. Before nap, and before bed, they cleanup and put everything back inside. And if you don't want to look at toys anymore, just close the lid and they're out of sight.
So take THAT, entropy. You may have laws of thermodynamics on your side, but we have simple but stylish storage solutions on ours.
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