A follow-up to my declutter post

Even an old dog can relearn old tricks...I do love to declutter and get rid of things. But I am relearning that sometimes we(I) can get out of balance. Take my children's toys, for example. When my older four children were little we had the big toy box with all kinds of toys in it. But as we had more children I was inspired by what a friend of mine does. When our children went over there to play out would come one toy bucket at a time with one type of thing in it, such as legos, farm/tractor type toys, duplos etc. I just loved the idea of purging our assortment of toys and organizing things in to types of buckets. We currently have a different bucket for food, legos, duplos, farm animals/tractors, cars, KNEX, Playmobile, Lincoln Logs and wooden train tracks/trains. I do really like that way of storing their toys BUT....

Here is where the old dog relearned an old trick....we recently went to another friends home for dinner and fellowship. While we were there the boys had the best time playing with an assortment of different toys. Now some of that may have been that to them they were "new" toys but it got me to thinking about what my boys do when they play here at home and I realized that although I do love the way we have our toys separated and stored, I don't really have many toys to keep a 23 month old and a 3 year old interested for long. The toys that we have are more suited for children a bit older who are ready to sit for extended periods of time building towns, farms or trains. So I am seeing that I need to rethink our toy situation with our little boys in mind and with the thought that little "Audie" as we call B#9 will soon be in the same stage the boys are in.

I guess for me the lesson is that there needs to be a balance to everything we do. Organizing is great but there are also seasons in life where it is okay to have an assortment of toys for the children for those many times when mom needs to get things done.