April 25, 2008

I'm not going to have much time for House Purging this week. I am busy, like many of the musicians in town, with Estes Park Sings rehearsals. And it's worth it - the show is going to be very entertaining, and is for a great cause: the Estes Park Rotary Scholarship Program which gives out over $30,000 in local scholarships every year. Support the college-bound teenagers of Estes Park by coming to see the show tonight or tomorrow!

With me not having time to purge this week, I will finally address the most requested topic by you, and the most dreaded topic by me. Purging children's toys. You can feel free to knock yourself out with it this week, while I'm having fun singing and dancing.

Where to even start? Our house is simply overrun by toys. Truly. We have so many toys that the kids are so overwhelmed by the choices they have, that the big kids would prefer to play outside, and the baby would prefer to play with belly button lint.

Here are some seemingly obvious tips to get you started:

• If it's broken, purge it.
• If it's been outgrown, purge it.
• If the kids never play with it, purge it.
• If it's run out of batteries, and you never intend to have the batteries replaced because it's obnoxious, purge it.

Those are my rules. I know it's not quite that easy, especially when you factor in the kids' opinions, and the mental block of, "But this might buy me 15 minutes of dishwasher loading time if I hang on to it."

Consider an experiment I once tried. Using "Love and Logic" technique, when the kids had a messy room, I said, "Feel free to clean up any toys you want to keep." They cleaned up their "lovies", and not too many other toys. Everything else was stuffed into garbage bags and put into storage. (They were not happy about this - believe me.) The kids then only had about ten toys remaining. They played with them all the time. They found new ways to play with them. They found ways to combine all the toys to use together. They had a reasonable, maintainable amount of toys. They could keep their toys cleaned up. I could afford to keep up with battery replacement. It was pleasant. I had planned to give the "thrown out" toys back to them once they could show me they could keep their room clean, but I didn't need to give them back. They weren't missed.

Throw one holiday into the equation, and an insane amount of new toys from the spoilsome grandparents, and we were back to drowning in toys. The kids lost all interest in everything again, and were back outside playing with sticks, rocks and dirt. (Which I like to encourage anyway, I might add.)

Parents want there to be less toys. I believe strongly that kids want there to be less toys, too, even though they may not recognize that. Less inside toys mean more outside time. It also means more time for art, music, imagination, and creativity in general. Let's make this toy purge about whittling down quantity to get to the quality toys hiding at the bottom of the toy box.

To avoid a lot of distress, power struggles, and trauma (written with the back of my hand dramatically placed across my forehead), it's important to enlist the kids' help in this process. It's important that they feel that they have some control over what is happening to their belongings.

We talk about purging for a "healthier" house all the time with the kids. They've seen Mommy and Daddy setting an example by purging their own belongings. So, when I started talking to them about purging their toys, they understood what that meant, and why we're doing it. You will definitely want to have that dialogue with your kids.

It may also help to have a reward or incentive. My family's incentive is that we are saving money from our House Purge to go on a Disney Cruise. We are trying to prove to ourselves that we have so much money tied up in stuff that we don't use, want or need, that we could afford to fulfill a dream that we do have by purging that stuff. Yes, that dream is a Disney Cruise. Admittedly, dreams are readjusted to accommodate the three young children in our lives. My six-year-old, Aaron, says that, "We have to get rid of toys to turn them into a Disney Cruise." Yeah, close enough.

Just out of curiosity's sake, I just had my four- and six-year-old make a list of the ten toys they DON'T want to have purged.  The items that made that list were surprising to me. I was also surprised how hard it was for them to come up with ten things. I'm going to consider this list the "protected" toys, as silly as some of their choices may seem to me. They have survived the toy purge unscathed, and I will leave them alone. All other toys will have to go into the Toy Purge Gauntlet and fight for their lives in this house.

Child development expert and Director of Lifelong Learning of Estes Valley, Nancy Johnson, suggests allowing grade school kids to donate the toys. "This age group will be very interested in charity to other children." Charity would be a great way to get a grade-schooler to be excited and cooperative about paring down their stuff.

Purging the toys of a preschooler might require more trial and error than the toys of a grade-schooler. "You might put preschoolers' toys that you plan to get rid of in a box for a month and see if the child misses them and asks for them.  Sometimes it is difficult to anticipate what toys your child can't live without!" Nancy suggests.

This week, start a dialogue with your kids about the dreaded Toy Purge. Explain how much easier cleaning their room will be once a lot of the toys are gone. Find out what's important to them, and what they would voluntarily purge. I'll go into details about books, stuffed animals, teeny-weeny Legos, and sentimental items next week.