A tidal wave of toys

So spring is here. The daffodils are swaying happily in every garden and the weather is just good enough to let the kids venture outside so you get a moment’s peace, a cup of tea and a chance to sit quietly.

 

That’s when you get a proper look at the kids’ destruction. Oh my god, has it always been this bad? Toys were strewn from room to room. Tractors, dollies and bits of Lego had all managed to creep their way out of the sitting room and into every other corner of our house. Even the bathroom!

 

Before No.2 came along, we seemed to manage fine. We had the toy box in the corner of our sitting room and the toys we had fitted very neatly into those compartments. But with his arrival, tractors and trains and dinosaurs started creeping into the toy corner to join the dollies, tea sets and never-ending tiny dresses for Barbie’s fashion shows.

 

Add to that the fact that we don’t have a dedicated playroom and No.1 just had her first proper birthday party with lots of presents and the situation has become dangerous. The toys are crammed into the toy boxes and are also piled precariously on top. We have a very nice, rather large car park of cars, tractors and diggers underneath our coffee table. My sitting room felt like it was being swallowed up by a tidal wave of toys.

 

This had to stop.

 

 

So out came the black bin bags and thus began a Spring Clean like our house had never seen before. Piles were made of different toys: toys we wanted to keep (which was a lot in No.1’s case), toys that  were for ‘babies’ (her words not mine) and the bits of broken toys which somehow always end up under the couch.

 

After hours and hours, we sorted, negotiated, re-sorted and bagged the toys, all the while No.2 staged a sneaky protest by meddling with our system.

 

Finally, it was done, and with the kids tucked up in bed, I could actually get to the couch with my cup of tea without standing on a Lego friend. Sitting there, gazing admirably at the results of my hard work, I naively thought: “wouldn’t it be wonderful if this could last?”

 

 

But it didn’t. Precisely 2.4 seconds after our two darlings got up the next morning, it was back to normal; in fact, No.2 continued his protest by emptying every box of its neatly tidied contents.

 

Sometimes, you just can’t hold back the tide.