Oh my did Christmas ever drive home the point that we are in times of excess! I'm just as guilty as the next person. Kelly and I had planned on filtering Riley's toys out before Christmas, but we ran out of hours in the days so we did it the week after Christmas.
It was definitely eye opening! No wonder kids these days have ADD! Seriously, they have so many toys! As they play with one toy, 3 other ones go off competing for their attention! It's BAD!
Since we had already been talking about it, then I read another article in Time magazine stating stats from a similarly themed study - the average kid has 150 toys! And the person in the article recommended cutting that back by 75%, so that was the final motivation we needed!
We went to work packing away toys he's outgrown, donating what he never really took a liking too, etc. We also decided that we would cut the toys he has out to play with in half, then rotate in new toys every 2-4 weeks. I found that he really has almost 2 of every kind of toy - 2 shape sorters, 2 sets of blocks, definitely tons of books and a lot of them 2 of a kind, multiple Little People sets, many puzzles, etc. We kept out his "all time favs" that he plays with EVERY day, then chose a few more to keep in the active rotation. The rest are packed away in a box in his closet for now. I have a few out on the closet shelves, and when he sees them and wants to play with them I let him. It's like they are new every time he sees them!
We also found that toys we thought he never liked, he totally liked once he was able to actually SEE them! As we were sorting through all the toys, he'd see something he hadn't seen in a while and it would be brand new to him! He'd actually get excited!
To be honest, there's still too many toys but it's a start!! And so far it's been a raving success!! We just have to keep it up from here on out!! Simple is Good!!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment