Declutter Your Home: The Ultimate Guide to Toy Rotations

Hello, Mamas! Welcome back! In this episode, I'm sharing my personal journey and insights on how to create a more peaceful and organized living space through the power of toy rotations.

If clutter and disorganization make you feel stressed and overwhelmed, you're not alone. I'll walk you through the step-by-step process I used to set up a successful toy rotation system for my 3.5-year-old son, transforming our home into a calmer and more creative environment.

In this episode, you'll learn:

1. Setting Up a Toy Rotation: I'll walk you through sorting toys, creating a fun & engaging visual guide with your kids, and establishing a clear timeline for rotating toys.
2. Sustaining a Clutter-Free Home: I'll share tips on staying consistent with your rotation, managing gifts during birthdays and holidays, and responsibly donating toys your child has outgrown.
3. Maintaining a Peaceful Environment: Discover how to involve your child in the process, making it a positive and empowering experience for both of you.

Don’t miss this chance to reclaim your space AND foster creativity in your home. Tune in now and start your journey towards a more sustainable and stress-free life today!

P.S. Please subscribe and leave a review if you found this episode helpful. It's such a quick and easy way to support the show! ✨

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Transcript

Katie Kurpanek: 0:00

Hello Mamas, Welcome back to the show. So I don't know about you but when my living space or my workspace is a mess, I feel super stressed and dysregulated. Like, it is harder for me to focus on a task when everything around me feels disorganized or just cluttered. And like I actually feel claustrophobic in these moments. And in these spaces, it is so hard. And then it's not just me, I have noticed that this actually has an impact on my son as well. So he's currently three and a half years old at the time of this recording. And I have noticed that when his play space is like cluttered, there's just like toys everywhere, I don't know we've taken a while to clean up or he's just gotten a whole bunch of like, new toys or gifts or something, he gets overwhelmed and irritable with his space. And I can imagine that it's hard for him to play freely if he doesn't have enough room, or there's like an overwhelm with choices, right, he has so many options that it feels kind of chaotic, and he just kind of bounces around from thing to thing. And he doesn't actually stick with one toy or activity for very long. So storytime, this past holiday season, and my son's birthday is right before the holidays. After that, I was just feeling so overwhelmed and was seeing the same like symptoms, like I discussed with, you know, just overwhelm for my son, because we had all these new toys, all these new activities we had had, you know, friends and family in town, so everything was kind of chaotic and messy, our house was disorganized. And so as a sanity saver for myself, and a tool of like empowerment and peace for my child, we ended up doing something called a toy rotation, and I will never look back, it has been a game changer. So today, let's get into some of the most helpful things that you can do to declutter your living space, and foster more creativity in your own kids. Okay, so number one, if you are interested in setting up a toy rotation, here is what I would recommend whether you are setting this up before your kids even like know any different, maybe they're a baby right now, and they have no choice in the matter. Or if you are making a change to your child's currently established routine like I did for my son and this is different. Either way, I would highly recommend to involve them as much as possible, right, depending on how old they are. As your baby grows, you can involve them more. But in the process, if you can sort through, start by sorting all of you know, their toys, their games, their activities, this is going to take a little bit of time. So maybe plan, you know, half of a weekend day to spend on this with your child together, make it like a really fun thing. You could have special snacks or something involved. Then once you've sorted that, you can create a poster and this is really fun, you can make this super fun with your kids, create a poster that you're going to hang up and display somewhere on your fridge, on the wall, on the door to the closet, wherever it is create a poster with these categories. In our poster, we have a category for cars, we have another category for trains and train tracks, we have a category for dinosaurs, you know all the different toys that like my son has been given or we bought. So you can build that out together, you can make it colorful, engage your kids in coloring with you. And then you're going to put on this poster a timeline. And you get to establish what this looks like for your family. So do you want the toy rotation to be like rotating on a weekly basis? Do you want it to be a monthly basis? Do you want it to be seasonal, maybe the categories that you made were like, these are toys that are really great to bring out in the winter. These are toys that are really great for the spring, the summer, whatever it is. So put on the poster, a very clear timeline so that it is like a visual cue for you and your child. And then you just need to put up this poster and take the organized groups of toys, maybe you're going to need some bags or some bins, some cardboard boxes would do just fine. However you want to organize it and put the toys somewhere where you both acknowledge, or if you have multiple kids, you all acknowledge that this is where these toys are going to live right now. And one set or two sets of toys are going to come out at a time, whatever guidelines you want to put around this. So in my family, we have like a weekly toy rotation. Sometimes we do it twice a week like midweek, but he knows that these toys, you know, they're all stashed in this one area of the basement. And when it is time to rotate the toys, then he gets to go to the poster and he gets to choose which one or two categories of toys he wants for that time. Then we go get them together. It's really exciting. We bring them out. And then at the next time where it's time to switch the toys then he knows he gets to help me be a part of cleaning them up, which also clean up takes way less time because it's way less things, and then he helps me clean them up, bring them back over to that part of the basement. And he's picked another category, one or two categories of toys to bring out. That's personally how we do it and have found a lot of success. I want you to notice, while you kind of feel this out for a while, maybe a few months, I want you to just be noticing, are there any categories of toys that your child gravitates towards all the time just again, and again, these are like the favorite things. Are there any categories that are untouched for a long time. And as you notice this, I want you to just bring it up in conversation with your child depending on how old they are, and just just noticing it like, so that they are also aware of this, because in the next part that we'll talk about, then that helps them to be ready to eventually move some of these toys on because they are aware that they haven't really been wanting to play with them for a while. If you need more support in how to navigate those conversations, depending on the age of your child, we have so much support for you inside The Eco Minded Mama Collective. But we'll talk more about that later. So the next thing I want you to keep in mind is now that you have a system that is in place that is going to work really well for you, at least for right now, maybe you'll adjust it here and there. But now, what can you do to reduce the amount of clutter or the feeling of clutter in your home and sustain this peaceful creative system that you've now put into place. So a few tips. Number one, I want you to stay consistent with your rotation, that visual timeline, that poster that you made with your kids, I want you to stick to it. Do your best, even if they push back for a while, this is just a new routine, it's going to take you know a few weeks probably to get used to it. So sticking to your boundaries as much as possible, sticking to the poster, and just holding that boundary. The longer that you do that, the easier it will become. Second tip for things like birthdays and holidays, anytime where your kiddo is going to be possibly receiving gifts, then you can do some reflecting together leading up to it. So like we talked about those conversations before, you can be helping to bring the awareness of what they no longer enjoy or play with what they've outgrown, and the things that they really, really love. And you can start talking about what is something that they need, what is something that they want, maybe it's just two things for right now that you could be, you know, gifting them or family members could be gifting them. And then you could turn towards experiences. So there's a balance here of tangible physical items they can enjoy and actually use, and experiences. They don't always have to have a physical item as a gift. You can also ask your family members, if you have family members or friends who absolutely love to give and they are so generous and they want to care for your child, you could ask them to keep some of those gifts as like a special thing for their home. Maybe they have a designated space in their home, that is for their grandson or something, you know their nephew, and they have some toys and things that they have bought that lives at their house. And it's very special when your kiddo gets to come over and play with these things. But it stays there, not everything has to end up back at your home for you to have to deal with like the cleaning and the maintaining and everything. When it comes time to pass along some of the things that they have outgrown, then I want you to consider donating responsibly. So a couple ideas. A few episodes ago, we talked about the Buy Nothing groups or the Buy Nothing challenge. And so you could look up, you know, buy nothing groups in your area, you could even just go on Facebook marketplace, basically hand me downs, right handing down your toys to community members who actually want them and will use them, rather than just like dumping everything at a Goodwill or a thrift store. If that's the only option in your area, then that's not terrible. But oftentimes, thrift stores just get so overloaded with donations, and then they can't, they just can't keep up, it's too much. And a lot of things end up in the landfill. So passing on hand me downs as much as possible is really helpful. And preparing your kids leading up to that event. Maybe you pull out the toys that they haven't played with in a really long time. And you talk about how you get to have a couple of weeks to enjoy these toys and these activities one last time and then we're going to pass them along to so and so. It's always really helpful if you have a particular kid or family in mind. And your kids can feel really great about passing that on to somebody who will get a lot of joy out of using them. This is not always easy. Trust me, I know, I'm in the thick of it. We have loved our toy rotation. And it is something that has been a game changer for our sanity and creativity in our home. But I'm not going to say that it was always easy. But it is something where you will be constantly learning and adjusting especially as your kids grow and age and develop. And we are adjusting too all the time. So it is so much better and easier when you can do this kind of stuff with the support of other moms or other parents who are also in the thick of this with you. You can brainstorm together, you can talk about your kids' reactions or conversations that you just had in real time and help each other problem solve and come up with creative solutions or ideas that maybe you never thought of before. Just the other day inside The Eco Minded Mama Collective, we had one of our mom members named Suzanne who was asking for support when it comes to birthday parties and gift giving and the areas that she was specifically struggling with her kiddo at the age that they are. So it was really heartwarming to see the level of support and solidarity shown in her post. And that is something that I want to make available to all of you. So if you haven't heard already, this month of June has been Jumpstart June. That's what I'm calling it is just a exciting promo because June is my favorite month. I want to continue the celebration and give you a gift of joining this membership program totally for free for one month. If this is something you have thought about, or you're just thinking about it now and you would like to take part in it and try it out. You can use the code JUMPSTART, all one word, all caps, for one free month inside The Eco Minded Mama Collective. And today is actually the last day of June at the time of this recording. So this code JUMPSTART is going to expire at midnight. So this is your last chance if you haven't already hopped on this and joined the Collective. You will want to do that now, you can go to the show notes, the episode description you will find the link and the JUMPSTART coupon code, and jump on this! I would love to give you a jumpstart into your own journey of sustainable living and help you find peace and save money and just live with overall less stress in your life as an eco minded mama. I hope to see you on the inside. It is so much fun. And I will be back next week for another episode with sustainable living tips.