Toy Upheaval

I've rearranged the children's toys before and that time has come again.  But this time I'm doing it with a twist.  We were back up in the attic, with more bins and some new racks trying to get to my ultimate goal of knowing exactly where everything is.  I dislike not knowing where something is and even though we've been busy with two babies, we've been in this house for a year-and-a-half now and it's about time we finished sorting the attic.

I found two boxes of dog toys I'd saved over time.  And I discovered something.  Dog toys (some of them) make great baby toys.  There was a fuzzy squirrel house.  It had three small squirrels you could pull out and put back in the stump/house.  It was just like a cute child toy, but target to pet owners. 

There were other toys, like a feather on a stick and some bouncy, rattly balls and even some child toys that I dubbed dog toys at the time of purchase.  And squeaky.  Lots of squeaky things.  My dog was excited to see so many toys out and my children were happy she was interested in the new items they were playing with. 

So a box of new toys was downstairs now and I had to decide where to put it in the already full toy areas for the children.  I got to thinking about a conversation my husband and I had had about volume of toys and how less can be more interesting and engaging.  So I got several plastic bins and started going around the house, "putting up" fifty percent of the toys that were out.

My children watched me as I put away all their favorite things.  Favorite things they had little interest in of late.  Suddenly, things my son hadn't touched in a while were noticed and he began to pull out things from the back of the closet into the room and play with them.

After putting up several bins, my new plan is to swap toys in and out.  As new toys arrive, older toys will get banked for a while.  When the current toys get stale, "new" toys will be magically pulled out of storage and swapped. 

The Big Boy Update:  Shape sorting.  There are little containers with holes in the top in the shape of circles, squares, triangles, stars, etc.  There are plastic pieces inside the container you take out of the container by taking the top off.  You put the top back on and then put the shapes back into the container via the matching shaped hole.  Very Sisyphean.  But excellent activity for a small child.  My son can do this, but he seems to have to relearn each shape every time he goes back to the toy.  The other day I saw him for the first time grab each shape and go directly to the correct hole without trying other holes first.  And once he'd gotten the first green circle in, he went straight to the circle for the remainder of the round pieces.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Dog curl sleeping.  Have you seen a dog preparing itself for a nap?  The dog curls around in a circle until he's got it just right and then sleeps in a nice balled up mass of fur?  My daughter has started sleeping in an entire different manner than she has before.  When you put her in the crib, she rolls over and then begins to curl around, looking for some blanket to grab and press her head into.  She's gotten legs stuck underneath her before, which looks uncomfortable, but if you right her, she just repositions herself until she's exactly how she needs to be to go to sleep.

Fitness Update:  Running with Rebecca.  My cousin and I have been planning to run together for some time now and today, we made it happen.  She has not one, but two lakes near her house.  We ran by one and then ran/walked around the second one.  Running together is a great way to catch up and she and I never run out of things to talk about.