Unfortunately, it's become a habit around our house for our children to play with something in one room for awhile, and then leave the toys where they lay and move to the next room. They enter the next room with a collection of toys from the original room, and as they meander through the house during the day, they deposit toys in every room! (Does this sound familiar to anyone?)
At the end of the day I try to straighten and pick up the toys. But at that point, the kids are sleeping in the rooms that the toys belong in, so... things don't always get to where they belong.
Having stepped on and tripped over too many toys laying on the floor, I have recently begun trying to instill some good cleaning-up habits in our home.
Truthfully, I'm almost embarassed to write this post because it's likely that most of you already have a system in place (and probably a better one!), or have been doing something similar for ages.
However- our "system" has been working so well for us, I thought I'd share.
A couple of weeks ago, I gathered up all the toys that I found on the floor of our playroom and stuck them into a laundry hamper. I then set the hamper in the middle of the floor and explained to my children that I was going to set the timer for 10 minutes. I told them that when the timer beeped, if there were any toys still in the hamper, they would go into the garbage (!)
On that first occasion, I helped guide them a little to ensure that everything was going away in it's proper place. I think it is important for everything to have a spot in order for this to work. We have a larger version of one of these:
 so it's easy for our kids to see what belongs where.
When the timer went beep, the hamper was empty. And our children were elated and proud of themselves for doing it well before the timer!
I only used the hamper that first time. Now I just periodically call out, "10-minute cleanup!" I give a bit of instruction as to where I'd like them to focus their energies, and they scramble about to beat the timer. I've been doing this about 3x a day, (once before lunch, another in the afternoon, and another before bedtime). And this has worked wonders for the cleanliness of our home.
In addition, the kids love it. My daughter, especially, is really into this. She gets a little frantic that things might get thrown into the garbage and becomes a speedy little cleaner-upper. I've heard her often call out her own "10-minute cleanup!" instruction to her little brothers as she sees things getting messy. It's very cute.
For the first time last night, I set the timer for 5 minutes and told them to clean up the little cars and a few other toys they'd been playing with. My daughter ran about cleaning up, but my son chose to play during the 5 minutes instead. We noticed he was doing this, and encouraged him once, but let him continue playing. When the timer went off, my husband and I headed into the room with a garbage bag, and packed up all the little cars he'd been playing with. There were many tears from both of our children. My son plays with those cars every day, many times a day.
Now, we didn't actually throw the cars away. We just packed them up and took them away. We explained that they wouldn't get to play with those toys for a day (Mark says it should have been longer, but I had to come up with something spur of the moment because I hadn't pre-thought this part of it!) My son, especially, was very disappointed and tearful but understood it was because he had played instead of cleaning up.
Anyway, that's our system.
What's yours?
~Stacy
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