Ok.. so we’ve spoiled our kids. With the boys, anytime we buy a toy, we buy them in two’s to curb the fights over a toy. Everyone knows getting a kid to clean their room is like trying to give a Jaguar a bubble bath. It’s a battle! Trying to get a toddler to clean their room is enough to send you into a frenzy. I was spending hours a week cleaning the boys’ room. On almost a daily basis. I was sick of picking up 1,392 hotweels, 212 Little People, and everything else. When i would try to get them to help, they just stood there and refused. Part of the reason… when kids’ rooms get to a certain degree of mess, they are much like us, they feel overwhelmed and don’t want to do it at ALL!

Here’s where I started:

I bought more of the bins like in my living room. I love these things, they are a neutral color, a great size, and very durable, even with kids dumping them out and standing on them!  They already had a shelf unit in their room, that things were just stacked on, I cleared everything off, and found that I could fit 12 of these big bins on the shelf unit.  I began sorting toys to figure out what they had, I used this opportunity to toss things that were missing parts, broken, are no longer age appropriate. Once I got an idea of what we had, I labeled all the bins. Kota can read without a problem, so it wasn’t an issue, Bryant can’t read yet, but I temporarily put pictures on each bin to show what was inside. A great way to do this is check your local office supply chain and look for clear Computer disc pockets that are self adhesive (these are usually made to stick inside binders and and folders to hold disks.) They are great for holding labels that you want to be able to change, and for this project they were big enough to put pictures down into.

Now, everything is labeled and in their bins -

• Small Cars (hotwheels and matchbox types)
• Big Cars (the larger die cast type)
• Imagination Play (this has things like binoculars, Dora’s map, pretend camera, Diego backpack, pretend compass, those kinds of things)
• Food (this is toy food, pots and pans, etc that go with their toy cash register)
• Books (we have ALOT of child books around here, Like I said, Kota loves to read).
• Little People and other Figures (this has their millions of little people, action figures and animals)
• Little People Play (there’s two bins for this, its the bigger pieces of towns and cars and villages for the little people)
• Balls (yep, they are boys, every kinda ball you can imagine)
• Tools (they have so many different plastic tools like daddy’s)
• Games
• Off the top of my head I can’t remember the other labels at the moment, but it gives you a starting idea.

Bigger toys – I bought the same matching bins, only in a much bigger size, this is for bigger size toys. They are labeled also and lined along one of their walls.

Now that everything is labeled, and there is a spot for EVERYTHING, they don’t get overwhelmed when it’s time to clean up, instead of trying to ‘figure out how to clean it, they already know where things go.

For the fun part… GETTING THEM TO  A CLEAN ROUTINE:

I started in the morning allowing myself enough time to make their beds when I woke them up.  It turns out, it takes about 4 minutes per bed to make in the morning. I started on Monday, and went all the way through the week doing it. While I was making their bed, I would give them each a task, they could do easily. On Saturady, here’s where things started really going into effect. I woke them up, made their beds, but… I closed us into their room and said we could not go downstairs for pancakes and Saturday morning cartoons UNTIL they cleaned their room. NOOOoooooo, evil mom, no saturday cartoons?  So sat there letting them clean what they would until they lost interest, then I had to change things up a bit. I started a game. I looked around the room and was like.. OK, “Find 5 cars”. Each of them hustled around until they had both grabbed up 5 cars. I had them put them in the bin. We did that until the whole room was finished, but sadly it wasn’t early enough to catch cartoons. 

Sunday morning, we did the same thing….I made beds, and they began picking up toys from the night before.  This time they were faster.  So Monday, I got them up, I made beds, they cleaned toys. Now we were getting the idea… We’ve been on almost 2 months of this now. It takes about an extra 10 minutes of morning time. Here’s what I found… Even toddlers can reason.. They realized if they don’t pull as many toys out at night, they don’t have much to pick up in the morning. So they are getting in the habit of putting toys back in their bins as they play. So now we are going to bed with a cleaner room, and waking up with one. I have not cleaned up toys in weeks. I did take the time to sift through the bins a little bit and make sure any toys hadn’t gotten placed in the wrong spots.

Now every morning they are proud when it’s clean, and BOTH of them always take one last glance around the room before leaving out and Kota will say “all clean” and once he says “all clean” Bryant takes that as his cue to close their door.

I’m totally amazed how quickly it became habit for them, and how well they have embraced it. 

It’s cut short my cleaning time tremendously. The only things I am really having to do to their room on a regular basis now is dust, vacuum, and change their bed linens!

Easy peasy now! Who knew it could be that simple, if I had known, I’d have done it ages ago!

About a week’s process, and they’ve developed a good habit, and now they are already taking PRIDE in getting a task done!