Getting your children the latest and the greatest toys is exciting! You bring it home. They squeal in delight at the shiny new toy wrapped up in the impressive packaging. They tear into it and you cut off eight million choking hazard zip cords and then they play with it for eight to ten minutes. Then its over. It's dropped on the ground as they search for the next toy. As their parent you realize very quickly that the thrill of a new toy ends so abruptly that you tell yourself to stop buying them toys. They have enough! Then your sister, brother, aunt, uncle, mom, and dad visit and bring more toys. They have birthday parties and get more toys. They go to a birthday party and leave with a goody bag filled with toys. Pretty soon you are buried in novelties and trinkets and dolls and knickknacks and baubles and games. You try to organize them into cute Skip Hop bins and store them in adorable Land of Nod cubbies, but they keep dumping them out! Pretty soon you are just throwing them in any bin and running out of storage. So you buy a Pottery Barn toy box and the pile of toys mounts well above the top of the box. You put the kids to bed at night and you see the toys everywhere. This is where parenting gets overwhelming for me. I like playing with them and will gladly take them anywhere by myself, but the cleaning is too much. EVERY SINGLE DAY you have to pick those toys up and throw them somewhere. So I took a sitting room we never used and called a carpenter and had him build in shelves and a window chair. I took every single toy we owned and put it outside so I had to look at each toy and really decide if it deserved to re-enter the house. I donated 13 bags of toys to kids in need. Then I headed to Target and grabbed some pretty bins to hide the toys that didn't fit in the built-in. I also grabbed a ridiculously adorable bull head to mount above the window. Now I can shut the cabinets and have EVERY toy out of sight and out of mind. Problem solved.
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