It gets this way every year about this time. The kids’ birthdays are coming up (one in two weeks, one in September), and they begin to grow, well, tired of their toys. We don’t buy them toys often at all. Birthdays and Christmas are reserved for most gift-giving.

Needless to say, with little ones, they’ve pretty much outgrown developmentally the toys they received the summer before by the time their next birthday nears….and every year, I have learned a little way to keep them pacified and help them enjoy their current toys all over again.

I call it “reorganization, rotation, donation.”

I set aside 1/2 to 1 whole day for the process. Here’s what we do:

1. While kids are occupied elsewhere, I go through and root out toys they’ve outgrown. I put some into a pile to keep for sentimental reasons, and another pile goes to donation purposes (either to friends and family or a charity). Sometimes I let my oldest help me with this decision making, so that I can use it as a teaching moment on how to share with others AND how to recognize that what doesn’t get played with needs to be given to someone who will enjoy it more.

2. We have toys in four separate places: In a toybox in the playroom, in a side-table drawer in the living room, in my son’s closet, and in my daughter’s bedroom toybox. I go to one location at a time, toting with me baskets or boxes, each designated for toys that need to be returned to their rightful spots. (This is for toys that go in sets, such as doctor’s kits instruments, Legos, or army men.)

3. After I go through all areas and take out what needs to go elsewhere, I then take out other toys and assign “new” spots for them. I place these into the chosen box to be taken to their new spot. This is the “rotation” part.

4. Then, I go around and distribute each box/basket one by one to each room.

Really, this helps us keep track of missing parts/pieces. Afterward, we will usually go around and look under furniture, rugs, etc. to find pieces we weren’t able to locate in other toy storage areas.

This also does wonders for letting the kids “rediscover” toys they’ve forgotten about. This past Monday, we did this whole process, and by day’s end, the kids were sitting quietly sharing slides for the ViewMaster, a toy we’ve had for years but rarely got noticed. (It was at the bottom of one toy drawer while the slides were equally distributed into every toy storage area, unkept and disorganized.)

Though I’ve read about more elaborate ways of rotating toys (such as having a tote box “toy library” in the garage), we honestly have enough storage space inside to keep toys nearby…..and we aren’t completely overrun with toys in the first place (that being a purposeful truth).

Reorganization, rotation, and donation works for me!

Go see other WFMW ideas at Rocks in My Dryer!