Toys
My girls don’t have a lot of toys. But they’ve slowly been disappearing and some of their books have too.
Why, you ask.
Well they haven’t been cleaning up after they decide to pile as many toys and books as they can get past me onto Eden’s bed.
Then after they have piled so many toys or books we make them clean them up and sometimes they don’t want too. I know shock little kids not wanting to pick up after themselves. The problem comes because 8 time out of 10 Eden has to be put into timeout just so she will begin cleaning up. Then once you mention clean up Lilah decides she’s tired, her arms are tired, her legs are tired, some thing is always tired. So we fight with them and hover over them to clean up the mess they’ve made. We’ve just started setting the timer and then taking away whatever they don’t put away.
It started about a week ago when Lilah did this to our couch.
Literally every child book we had was on the couch and nearly every toy. Jon had let her do this because when we try to limit what they take they complain, so he wanted Lilah to understand the consequences of piling everything together. Jon gave her a half hour to clean it up but mostly she just whined. We got a box and put all the toys and books that didn’t get put away in it and and put it in our closet. The box is big, something I got from Costco and is bigger than a laundry basket.
Today it was toys on Eden’s bed. They hadn’t heeded to Jon’s first attempts to ask them to clean up so Jon set the timer. Lilah had to go to the bathroom and you could hear her saying loudly how she didn’t care for the toys and didn’t want her stuff animals. Then when I went in there to wash hands it was all about how much she loved them and wanted to take care of them.
Eden did a lot of the cleaning up, so thanks to little sister Lilah has more toys and books to look at.
After the 15 minutes was up we put the few things left into another box to go into our closet.
I was going to give the big box of toys back this week, after a week of being taken away, but one, the girls have seemed to forget about them and two, they make big enough messes without those toys.
I’ll probably sort the toys out later this week, maybe Sunday after I have the baby shower and my lesson taught. I hope to organize them and clean off some toys that could use a good washing or disinfectant and then purge ones that either annoy me or find little use.
My kids don’t even have that many toys, but it sure feels like a lot when it takes 20 minutes to just clean up one little bed and lots of whining