by I think my brain exploded today. I decided that after doing next to nothing all day Saturday, that I should get up and do something today. So I did.
It started in her bedroom. She has a laundry basket of clothes to put away that had been there for a week. I started to work on it and she stopped me.
“Mommy I’m gonna give you your choices. You can be a mom and put away the clothes or you can be a great mom and play with me”
Needless to say, we played first. We busted out lots of little people, then we had a dance party in the living room. She requested Stephen Kellogg followed by Matt Nathanson. (That’s my girl!!) Then she wanted to pretend that I was the baby and she was the mommy. Well, this “baby” went to take a nap on “her” bed, and “Mommy” had to put away the clothes while being interrupted by “baby” every couple of minutes. Worked like a charm – she did my work for me!! 🙂
I didn’t take any pictures of her bedroom, but we gutted it. We emptied out 3 garbage bags of stuffed animals. And she still has an entire shelf left. Dear Family and Friends who are thinking about Christmas already — please don’t buy her more! 🙂
After that we had lunch and I moved on to the toy room. I wish I had taken a picture of the look on her face as I literally took EVERY.SINGLE.TOY out of the room and piled it onto the living room floor. It was priceless!
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Then we went through everything. I let her know that we had to get rid of toys to make room for new ones. She wasn’t sold. Then I explained that we had to give our old toys to other boys and girls, the baby toys should go to babies – and if we have two guitars, we should give one away to another little girl/boy that doesn’t have any at all.
That clicked – and she made me a pile of toys to give away. There were a few that I cringed at, and I wanted to keep – because I was sentimentally attached to them. But that would have made for a bad lesson… and ultimately – it’s her stuff, not mine! So we took pictures of everything so we could list each of them for sale online.
Then I rearranged the toy room. She helped me figure out where to put things and we pulled out a set of plastic drawers from upstairs. Daddy came home and made dinner… and at that point I lost my helper… probably better though as she was a little tired of helping me put things away!
Make sure you click on the pictures/slideshow below to see the comments for each of the photos!
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It’s a whole new playroom… I still need to go through the arts/crafts/color book shelf and clean that out, but other than that – everything has a place – and I actually ended up with some empty boxes, buckets and drawers in the end, which I’m sure we’ll find a way to fill back up quickly!!
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Stay tuned – it won’t be long before we kick off our online garage sale to try to get rid of some of those unused/outgrown/duplicate toys!!
