Season of Purge

It has been a productive week.. and it's only Tuesday! Amazing how much time you get back when you give up Facebook. :) If you've been following along lately, I've been on a quest to get my house totally cleaned and organized. My goal is to have everything thoroughly cleaned so I can just maintain. With school starting... probably next week... and my added duties of coaching cheerleading, I am not going to have tons of time to devote to house cleaning.

Most of you know that I've struggled with my children's messes and toys lately. I believe it was back earlier in the year that I purged all of the baby stuff and a full van load of toys were donated. It is time to purge again. I did things a little differently this time. I had the girls search the entire house for every toy they could find. We took every toy from the basement playroom, each girls' bedroom, and random toys throughout the house and brought them upstairs to our hallway floor. We poured out every toy box and container. It was quite a site! (There were 2 trash bags of trash & broken toys in there, as well as an entire load of laundry scattered throughout!) Have a look:

Look, there's a kid in there!

The picture really doesn't do it justice. It was really high! Anyway, I took every container/toy box we had and lined them up. They got to choose what toys stayed. (At least until they stopped helping and then Mama made the choice.) Once the bins were filled, we were done keeping toys! Before putting any toys back in the rooms, I did a full cleaning of floors, closets, & furniture. Additionally, the girls have to choose one toy a month to donate. Hoping we can keep this in check this time!