Getting rid of toys...

My house is a toy store, and it's not going to get better in 2 months.

How do you ever manage to get rid of toys? I got rid of a lot of them when we moved 3 months ago, it was mostly toddler toys like shape sorters, peek a bloks etc but they would still have played with them... Earlier just when I was making a craigslist post to get rid of some little people toys and that old crocodile xylophone, there came DS pushing his little people SUV around and DD started playing with the xylophone.

Sigh. It's seriously hopeless. Not like I actually manage to sell stuff on craigslist, but I would really like to be able to have the option... I mean, they mostly ignored their old Weebles playsets for a year, and they started playing with them every day since last week... same for that little tikes farm set I have.

Sigh... my kids have way too much stuff but they play with everything!

 

That's why I rotate stuff down into the basement. I have some stuff in "deep storage" for sale/donation, and some stuff just in bins in our finished basement. Most of the stuff downstairs is supposedly too young for them, but on the rare occasions we let them down there, they love playing with all of it! Just this weekend DH wanted to watch some football, so he brought them boys down and as soon as they hit the bottom of the stairs and saw all of the old stuff they gasped and say "Toys!" :lol: They played happily for almost 2 hours! ardon:

So if they see it, for sure they're going to play with it! If you really want to get rid of stuff, hide it until you can make arrangements for its removal.

 

If I noticed they haven't played with it in a while, I pack it up and move it on out. Usually when they get new toys I remove old ones so that they don't keep piling up.

The other day though I had my newborn toys out as I had a friend over and K&J were playing with all those toys and didn't want me to pack them up.....you can't win....

 

Mine still play with a lot of that "baby" stuff, and they would play with more if I hadn't chucked it out. Luckily for us, my kids have cousins who are exactly two years younger that them, so they're more willing to part with things if they know it's going to the cousins. But I still have to do it semi-secretly. Every once in a while I pull out things that either they don't play with, or I am just personally sick of :laughing: , and stash them in the garage. If no one notices in 6 months, out they go.

I also tell the kids (especially around this time of year) that if they want new things, they have to make room by getting rid of some old things. But it does get harder every year, since it's a lot less clear when they've outgrown something at this age than it was when they were babies. If there were things they truly didn't play with, I would have gotten rid of them already! So I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with their b'days and Christmas.

 

I just put a lot of stuff on craigslist, at least this way it's kinda out of my hands whether it goes away or not LOL.

 

I just get rid of the stuff that I think they are too old for. My kids are the same way, in that they will play with everything. We still have our push to ride toy and one day, after months of not bothering with it, my DS started playing with it. And we still have it...sigh.

 

A cluttered playroom drives me NUTS! Thankfully I have a closet in the playroom so I store a ton of stuff in there and just rotate it out when they seem to be bored or they need a change.
The worst is when they break into the closet without me knowing and take everything out and dump all the bins and buckets :headbang: