Thursday, September 17, 2009

Where's Katelee?

When we moved into our new place, we began keeping all of Katelee's toys in her bedroom.  Even though we had most of her toys in other rooms in our old house, we organized them well and everything fit just fine in her new room.  

But that only lasted for about two days.

This is pretty much what Katelee's room has looked like since we moved in.  It's like a girly version of Where's Waldo, right?
I'm totally ashamed when I think of the looks of horror that must be on the faces of all my organized and totally-together friends!  But, I'm just keepin' it real.  This is the sad, sad truth of my life.  

On the other hand, the rest of my house has stayed really clean!  Oh, I know that my bathroom's definitely need a good scrubbing, but I wouldn't be embarrassed for anyone to see the other rooms of my house.  But I'm definitely embarrassed about this room!

I've taken an hour out of my day twice now to totally clean it and organize and put it back together.  It takes Katelee about 7 minutes to return it to it's messy state.

Help!

I need to establish some routines for keeping the mess at a minimum.  But they also have to be routines that I can actually live with despite our crazy, busy lives.  I was thinking cleaning every night before bedtime, but I'm always exhausted then...  Should I take half of her toys away and put them out of reach? Any other ideas?  How do you help keep your kids' play space from looking like a scene out a natural disaster movie?

5 comments:

  1. That's about how our girl's room looks all the time- and there are 2 of them so it gets messed up twice as fast with even more stuff. We have no system for cleaning it, and i haven't stressed about it to much cause I can always just close the door and not look at it. I know we should do better- but i am still trying to figure out how to keep the rest of the house clean with 4 kids.

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  2. Looks just like Roo's room 99% of the time. The other 1% is the first few hours of having house guests! I fyou get it figured out, let me know!

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  3. Coming from a clean freak this works for me but if it doesn't sound like something you want to try then just ignore it. We pick up several times a day so it doesn't get too overwhelming. Usually I tell Brig I am making lunch i need you to put all the toys away you are done playing with and we will see who is faster. same type of thing for anything else needing to leave the house to run errands dinner time whatever. Good luck. That picture is hilarious.

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  4. I just read something today that I'm thinking of trying. This mom packed toys into 7 boxes (you could make them cute). Everything else was given away. One box a day came out, which supposedly completely entertained her kids because they hadn't seen those toys in a week. Interesting but....

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  5. I love the "Where's Wanda?" picture! :) So fun!
    You know what we do....we just make a rule that after you are done playing with one thing, that it gets put away before something else comes out. It takes a lot of reminding...but it eventually clicks. (And it's interesting to see the boys implement this rule with their friends.) :)

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