Simplification

I recently read this book for my parenting book club (yes, I am that nerdy) and it spurred on a move to simplify some portions of our lives. The basic premise of Simplicity Parenting is that our children's (and our) lives can get pretty crazy with tons of sensory overload, lots of stuff (toy, books, etc), busy schedules (kids and parents) and media influences. Taking steps to simplify those areas of our lives can help to let your children have the time they need to just be kids. Here is the Amazon synopsis:

• Streamline your home environment. Reduce the amount of toys, books, and clutter—as well as the lights, sounds, and general sensory overload.
• Establish rhythms and rituals. Discover ways to ease daily tensions, create battle-free mealtimes and bedtimes, and tell if your child is overwhelmed.
• Schedule a break in the schedule. Establish intervals of calm and connection in your child’s daily torrent of constant doing.
• Scale back on media and parental involvement. Manage your children’s “screen time” to limit the endless deluge of information and stimulation.

Many of the things addressed in the book were already things that we had made conscious decisions about with respect to our family. We don't have a television in our main living area - only in the basement. The television isn't on all the time. In fact it is rarely on when children are awake. Ollie gets "tv treats" several times a week to facilitate me getting ready in the morning and putting Henry down for naps. Ollie doesn't play on the computer yet, although we recently discovery starfall.com for learning letters, so that may change. We already follow pretty set schedules and routines for our kids, with regular bedtimes, naptimes, etc. We eat dinner together as a family.

One of the things we did feel we needed to address was the kid stuff. So we did drastically reduce the number of toys inhabiting our house. Playtime had evolved (or devolved) into just taking out a huge amount of toys and throwing them everywhere. It was highly irritating to both Mylo and myself and lead to continuous power struggles with Ollie about not throwing toys, not taking toys from Henry, and Ollie melting down when Henry would try to touch any of the 5 bajillion toys that were on the ground.

We followed the authors criteria (mostly) and reduced our toys by about 1/3 and our kid book collection by 1/4. I had a much harder time getting rid of the books than I did the toys. I had Ollie help me reduce the number of his stuffed animals because I felt those were more personal and I didn't want to upset him by getting rid of one of the critters that he has a connection to.

Here is the starting pile...

We brought all the toys into the basement during nap time and it was a little sickening to see just how many toys we had. It filled up the entire basement. I seriously almost puked in my mouth. We put all the toys in groups of like items and made piles: broken (trash); put away for family (all the nice toys that Grandma Wendy had given us but we weren't using); consignment/Craigslist; and goodwill. We got rid of toys that weren't being played with, were plastic, made noise, were duplicates, were broken, or were just plain obnoxious.

Here is the "go" pile as Ollie would say....it entirely filled up the back of our car.

We kept the toys that are wood, inspire creativity and imagination, inspire learning, inspire cooperative play, or are favorite toys. We were left with blocks, legos, trains, matchbox cars, the play kitchen/food, dinosaurs/animals, dress-ups, musical toys, puzzles/games, balls and some various baby toys. We also moved some our larger tractor/machinery toys to the garage to become yard toys.

Here are all the keepers (not counting the stack of floor puzzles/games)...

As you can see, a good portion of the toys are stored in cupboards, where they are not visible. Ollie can get one type of toy out at a time, i.e. blocks. He has to put that item away before we can get it back out again. We have noticed a huge difference in his play. He is playing more deeply with his toys, using more imagination to build a large structure from legos or line all his dinosaurs up or build a "crazy track" for his trains. Plus, we feel so much better not having kid crap strewn around our entire house. As an added bonus, we made a little over $100 off the toys that we sold on Craigslist and that doesn't even count all the consignment store credit we will be getting. Spring clothes shopping, here I come.