We took away the Toys...

The kids have this super bad habit.  It goes something like this.  Take all the toys and dump them all over the floor.  Add contents of drawers.

Like this, only a lot worse.  And with clothes.  (This isn't their room, because I can never remember to take a picture in the moment.)

So, in a great parenting moment, we banned all toys except books.  They may have found a stray toy or two downstairs or from some magical hiding spot that we weren't savvy enough to figure out.  But all that we could find were loaded up into containers and put into the garage.  Inside the old dog kennel.

I thought they would cry, be upset, beg for their toys back.  Maybe negotiate a toy or two with some sort of cleaning deal only 3 year olds could think of.  Nope.  Do you know what they do?

Read books.

Not one mention of the toys in the last week. Zip.Nada.Zilch.  They haven't asked for one thing.

I did not see that coming.

We already kept their toys pretty limited.  Some kids I know have every toy under the sun.  It drives me crazy.  Our kids have a box of blocks, a box of train pieces, some matchbox cars, some dinosaur and animal figurines, and one box of miscellaneous "girl" toys.  It sounds like a lot when I type it out, but compared to most people whose toy cup runneth over, we're running a little thin.

So now what?  We'll continue to keep the toys outside, and maybe slowly bring one or two items in for them to play with and then bring it back outside.  But since my kids have never been this interested in reading before, we probably won't be doing that any time soon.

They also want to color and play with playdoh a lot more.  Two other items that we didn't take away.  Probably because we don't keep those in their rooms and I didn't think about them.

Anyway, a long post to say you may want to take away their toys and have a little breather in terms of the messy room department.  And oh, it also fosters their imagination into more creative outlets.
A double win in my opinion!

So even though the outcome wasn't what I was expecting,  I am loving it.  And maybe when bad weather comes again (cause it always does in the North!), and they get their toys back, just maybe they will play with them like they are brand new and never seen before!