When in pain, organize!

So, as I mentioned before, Wyatt (our family dog) passed away a little over a week ago. He died on Thursday and on Friday Josh's mom offered to take the kids to Sidney to see my parents and play with their cousin, Victoria. We jumped on it because I thought that sounded like the perfect distraction after losing a pet. Plus, Josh and I are never going to give up a free weekend to ourselves! =) Also, Josh are I were kind of upset ourselves and sort of needed some to deal with losing Wyatt. (I know that sounds silly, it surprised us too. But he was just such a good dog!) Anyways, with a weekend with no kids and a little bit a grief, what would there be to do besides organize? So I did and my wonderful husband helped.

I had also mentioned in a previous blog that my kids NEVER clean their playroom. So I had taken away all of their toys for about a month. Seriously, ALL of them. I know this sounds cruel. But I needed to hit them where it hurt. And I still remember being 5 and my dad taking away all of our toys, puting them in garbage bags and sitting them on the roof for, I swear, like a month! (My mom doesn't remember it the same way, but i swear it happened) Needless to say, my brothers and I did not actually die of boredom, but we did learn that when my parents said "clean up your toys, or you'll lose them" ... they were serious! So my kids lost their toys for a while. I decided the point had been made and that is was time to bring the toys back. But I wanted to do it in a way that would make it easier for them to clean up so that they wouldn't get quite so overwhelmed. I sorted through all of the toys, got a couple boxes full to take to Goodwill. (I was serious about them losing some of them for good) And I organized the rest in a way that should be pretty manageable to maintain. The main thing is that I put all the buckets with lots of pieces and smaller toys locked away in a cabinet so that the kids have to ask to get them out. This way they can't just dump stuff. I also do picture labels on the containers and shelves so that the kids know where everything goes. Tip: I attach the labels with stick on velcro so that the labels can be removed pretty easily. This was very helpful this last weekend when I was reorganizing because I could move labels to different containers easily as I moved toys around based on our new needs (since I had gotten rid of a lot) The only downside to this system is that Isaac sometimes picks the velcro backing off the containers and has eaten a few pieces. So here is our playroom. I posted several pictures because some people have asked to see pictures of our house and I never really posted any because the house is kind of ugly, very 1961. So here is our playroom, notice all the lovely wood paneling? Maybe someday I'll post pics of the rest of our outdated crib. =)