Getting Real With Wanda Morrissey
Toys, toys, and more toys! There were days when I felt like I was drowning in toys. Toys in the living room, toys in the bedroom – there were even toys in the bathroom. I was always stepping on them or tripping over them. And, with the holiday season quickly approaching, there were only going to be more toys.
Enough was enough.
This weekend saw a toy purge at the Morrissey home. First, I bought a toy organizer so he could keep some of his favorite toys in the living room. Anything that didn’t fit in the organizer went into his bedroom. I then made three piles on the bedroom floor – the keep pile, the junk pile, and the donate pile.Toys my son still plays with went into the keep pile; the junk pile consisted of everything that was broken or damaged, and the donate pile had the toys that were still in good condition that my son no longer played with.
My son wasn’t as thrilled with the purge as I was. He kept pulling things out of the piles and putting them in his toy box. And he got very upset when I told him that his toy crane with the broken boom and missing wheel was going bye-bye. But the discovery of a forgotten truck at the bottom of the toy box soon helped him forget about the crane.
It took a couple of hours but in the end, we got the job done. The keep toys were put away neatly and the junk toys were taken out to the trash. It felt great to get rid of some of the clutter. The living room doesn’t look like a playroom anymore and a new rule has been introduced to keep it that way: if a toy is brought to the living room during the day, it goes back to the bedroom at night. And my son’s bedroom is neat and organized…for a few days anyway.
Sometime in the next few days, my son and I will take the toys from the donate pile to a local charity (there’s a women & children’s shelter just down the street). As I already mentioned, the holiday season is quickly approaching and it’s time my son learned that it’s not all about getting.
I can see this pre-holiday toy purge becoming a family tradition.
