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“A portrait of my daughter, once a week, every week, in 2014.”
Poet: she’s re-discovered the train set after we cleared out the toy chest. This is early morning; spring sun a welcome reprieve from weeks of rain.
I will discuss this at further length in my spring cleaning posts but once again I am reminded; less toys equals more play.
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i was just doing some early fall cleaning and was overwhelmed by mismatched toys- and we try so hard not to have too many toys and yet we are drowning in them. love how cozy her sweater seems,,,
Agreed! I love rotating the toys every six months. I have a giant $2 stripe bag in the shed and it works perfectly for toy storage.
P.S I love the composition of this photo and how there is more focus in Poet's long fingers than her actual body or face.
Such lovely lighting!
Gorgeous. My girls have very few toys and the ones we do have are rotated every month or so. It saves my cleaning sanity and fosters imaginative play and art more. Hope you're well, Linda. x
I have tried, several times, to cull the insane amount of toys my almost 2 year old has accumulated. I read Simplicity Parenting & it just makes sense. I look at all her toys in her room & I feel stressed & overwhelmed so i can only imagine how it makes her feel. We keep getting given toys by well meaning family, she now has 3 of those stupid 'pillow pets' and she doesn't touch any of them. My husband says we can't get rid of her toys because they were gifts. We just had a large storage shed installed at home so i'll be packing away as much as possible & reorganising her room to make it more calming & enjoyable for her.
We've got the same problem here. My 4 year old gets so many toys (always the cheap plastic ones) and even though we've talked to our families a lot about this, they just keep on giving. I'd so love to get rid of those toys and put away as many as possible. He's happy to play with sticks and stones and only gets irritated by too many toys.
Sometimes he agrees on giving some away, other times I'm using a box, where I secretly put all the toys in that he hasn't played with a lot. If he notices them missing, I can give them back to him without tears, if he doesn't notice, they'll be gone forever after a while. But that only works for a small amount of toys and I can't take away those other toys against his will. (Can I?)
How do you handle this? I'd be so glad for any tips in that matter!
Keep getting rid of them! If they don't care enough to listen then so be it. I think as a parent, it's not always what our children want. Sometimes just getting rid of them and then being straightforward, 'Yes, I got rid of those toys because…' and giving a good reason for it, is just fine. It's the same with late night ice creames or bedtimes, right? They'll survive the tears! 🙂
To freckles: Gifts stop being gifts when they become burdens and stress makers! You're the mother, just throw them out! I bet you 10$ your child and your husband will never notice a thing, except for the wonderful peace! Haha!
My mother in law is like that and gets offended that I get rid of almost all she buys my kids. So, I started either just leaving the gifts that she gives at her house or if I am getting rid of it, offering it to her before I do. That way the toys become her problem and not mine.
Also, about twice a year, I go through all my kids toys and get rid of anything that is broken, missing pieces and unusable, or just not played with.
One thing that worked for my cousin was asking friends and family for passes to the local zoo and other places where they could take their babes. We are planning on following in their footsteps. It cut way down on the amount of stuff they had and increased the number of experiences they were enjoying as a family.
Thanks for all your advice! I will definitely try what lingering daydreams wrote… it's so much better to give our kids time and experiences!
We've done something similar to Jessica and asked my parents in law a few months back to keep all those tiny plastic toys at their place – it really improved our situation here a lot!
We have the same problem with the amount of toys we receive and we live 5-7 hours away from family and 2.5 hours away from a shopping centre and we still end up with too much toys! It has been a real burden to our space and the amount of time it takes to maintain a lot of toys every day. Even though I subscribe to simple living our families don't. Toys are also so cheap these days you get given too much. I use to store a lot of the toys and then I started bit by bit taking them to the op-shop because we were much happier when they disappeared. We are moving in to a much smaller house and this has been a blessing because we have been down sizing a lot and are only taking what we love. So now we have a physical restriction to tell our well meaning families that we simply can not accept cheap plastic toys anymore. It has taken us 7 years to get to this point mind you!
She looks so grown up here Jodi. Such a beautiful little girl.
We loved the little Ikea train set at our place too however that is long gone now as my kids are 10 and 8. It's a beautiful photo and the light coming in the window looks so inviting. Congrats on the baby too. Regards Kathy A, Brisbane
So, so very true. What a beautiful little train driver xx
I have just purged a whole large garbage bag of toys to donate to Goodwill. Poets sweater is adorable and looks really warm! I finally finished the little vest from the pattern you sent.
Yes yes and YES. I am so very picky about toys and never let them go above a certain amount. If you let go, it just takes over everything, and in the end your child is left bored and surrounded by useless stuff. I think too many toys can confuse a sense of material value as well. It's learning to have this instinct about 'sentimentality' I think a lot of us love our children so much, everything becomes sentimental, but we have to work on letting go of such a mindset, it can be damaging! I think some people make it out to be mean, in a way… 'Oh, that mother doesn't allow plastic toys… how silly.' But, as mothers, we know what's best for our children, and if it means no plastic toys, or television, or whatever it may be… then so be it. Life isn't about giving our children what they always want, but what we know and feel they need, as their mothers. I love this photo, it's so very precious!
Such a gorgeous moment. Looking forward to reading more about simple toys! Sophie x
Alovely moment, beautiful lighting x
I absolutely love this photo. She is glowing. So beautiful.
People (other family members) often comment on how few toys Jarvis owns. But he has never minded. He loves his chickens and digging in the dirt way more than anything we have ever bought him