Time to toss toys!

It's Wednesday and that means anti-procrastination day! Flylady's Holiday Cruising Mission for today is to go through your kid's room(s) or toy boxes and toss the toys that are broken or missing pieces. You can also pass down or donate toys they have outgrown. Make room for the new stuff that they'll get in the coming holidays.

I did this last week on Monday and I ended up doing it again 2 more times last week! I tossed 3 plastic shopping bags FULL of toys and pieces. I also have a bag of toys to donate sitting in my van waiting for my next trip past Goodwill. My kids have so many hand-me-down toys (which are great) along with whatever they have received as gifts that it's hard for them to find which thing they really want to play with. I really enjoy getting the hand-me-down stuff because since they have survived through one or more kids already, they're generally the tough toys that are made to last.

We have a kind of evolutionary chain our toys go through in our house.
A toy starts out it's days in our living room where it will remain until I can no longer stand it. It then moves to the bedroom where it will surely spend about 6 months in the middle of the floor because, "I play with it all the time." It will then retreat to one of the stackable bins (from the dollar store) with a dish-tub inside (also from the dollar store) as a make-shift drawer. There it will stay until one of our massive weekend "I can't stand these rooms anymore" cleaning/flinging fest- usually right before a birthday. It is then moved to the basement. The toys in the basement will remain until a weekend when the kids are away or when I have an empty Home & Garden Party box. Then, they will mysteriously disappear and no one ever speaks of them again.

I actually had a huge yard sale this summer and convinced the kids that they could keep the money they made from selling their toys. They each made about $5 so they were happy with that. The rest was hauled to Goodwill by my DH the very next day.