Our house is overloaded with toys that Inês hardly ever plays with. Some take up quite a lot of room and are just something else to trip over. I find it hard to purge her toys because ‘this one is educational’ and ‘such-a-body bought that one for her birthday last year’ (sound familiar?). Every now and then I do go through them and remove the ones that she’s now grown out of but even that is hard work. I know, I know, I need to toughen up!
When she was a bit younger we used to rotate the toys, keeping some in a box under the stairs for a week or two, then swapping them over so the stored ones became interesting again. This worked really well although for some reason we stopped doing this. I must start to do this again.
A few months ago, I decided to offer out one or two of the toys she’d hardly touched but took up a lot of room. One of which was her toy garage. I lent it to my friend’s little boy who has enjoyed playing with it for the last few months. Inês didn’t even notice it had gone!
Last night my friend returned it and Inês was over the moon when she saw it. It was the only toy she played with all last night and it was the only toy she played with all this morning.
Playing with the toy garage in her pj’s.
I’m sure that she’ll soon be fed up of it again so we’ll probably be finding a new victim to palm it off on but for now we have a happy little girl playing with her toy garage.
Do you toy share between friends, have a rotation system going or have any other great ideas for minimising toys in your living room?
My 'Mummy' Journey 