The Toy Problem Is a Simple, Surprising Challenge
If you have stepped on a Lego brick in the dark at 2 AM, you understand parenting’s range and clutter.
That small plastic brick has done more damage to my mental health than any large life event. And somehow — somehow — despite the fact that I have removed toys from this house at least four times in the past two years, there are more Lego bricks today than there were when we started. They reproduce. They migrate. They show up in rooms where no child has played in months.
Week 5: The Toy Problem (Or: How We Ended Up Here Twice)
If you have ever stepped on a Lego brick in the dark, barefoot, at 2 AM, you already understand the full emotional range of parenting.
That small plastic brick has done more damage to my mental health than any large life event. And somehow — somehow — despite the fact that I have removed toys from this house at least four times in the past two years, there are more of them today than when we started. They reproduce. They migrate. They show up in rooms where no child has played in months.
This is Week 5 of The Summer I Got My Life Together, and we are going into the mess I have been avoiding longest: the kids’ stuff.
All of it.
God help us.
Let Me Set the Scene First
Four kids. A 17-year-old who is a senior. A 17-year-old who is a junior. A 10-year-old. And a 16-month-old who arrived just when we thought we were finally on the other side of all of this.
For a long time, I thought I was done with the baby chapter. We had cleared it all out — the strollers, the highchairs, the little plastic everything, the bouncy seats and the swings and the seventeen different pacifiers we tried before finding the one. The toddler stuff? Gone. All of it. We were free.
And then, seventeen years after doing it the first time, we started over.
I would not trade it for a single second. But I will be honest with you: starting over in a completely different financial place than you did the first time is a very specific kind of trap.
When my older kids were little, we bought what we could. We were practical out of necessity. Now, TikTok exists. And TikTok is the absolute worst — not in the way people say things are the worst while secretly loving them, but in the “I added six things to my cart at midnight because an algorithm decided my baby needed them” way. Every other video was screaming buy me, buy me and I, a grown adult woman, listened.
So here we are. One year postpartum, finally coming back to my senses, staring at a living room full of toys that a 16-month-old is completely overwhelmed by.
He has too much. I have too much. We are both done with it.
The Sheer Volume of It (How Did We Get Here, Again)
Here is what no one tells you before you have children: the stuff multiplies independently of you.
You do not buy most of it. It arrives. It arrives at birthdays wrapped in tissue paper and handed to your child by someone who loves them and means well and will not be the one cleaning it up at 9:30 PM on a Tuesday. It arrives at Christmas — times four kids, which means a truly staggering quantity of things that need batteries. It arrives at the end of the school year in backpacks: broken pencils, half-finished art projects, the little prizes from the prize box that cost three tickets and your child’s entire soul to obtain.
And then TikTok sends more.
With my older kids, I had phases. The Barbie phase. The train set phase. The slime phase — never again, not once, not ever. The phase where one of them was obsessed with rocks and now we have forty-seven rocks in a shoebox for reasons no one can fully explain. Those phases are mostly done. My seniors are 17. They do not need toys. They need things I cannot buy and cannot organize, but that is a whole other post.
My 10-year-old is in a different category — she loves to clean and organize, which is a genuine gift from the universe and one I am deeply grateful for. But even she is struggling, because it is hard to keep things tidy when there is simply too much stuff. Organizing only works up to a point. Past that point, the stuff wins.
And then there is the 16-month-old, who currently has more learning toys than a small preschool classroom and is primarily interested in pulling things off shelves and relocating them to rooms they do not belong in.
Where the Toys Actually Live (Spoiler: Everywhere)
Right now, the toys have claimed two territories.
Territory one: the living room. Which is also my office. I work from home, and our youngest stays home with me, so this is where life happens from approximately 7 AM until whatever time I close my laptop and accept that the day is what it is. I convinced myself he needed all the things — all the sensory toys, all the educational options, all the stuff I saw on TikTok described as “developmentally essential.” I needed him occupied so I could work. I needed him learning while I was on calls.
What actually happened: he is overwhelmed. I am overwhelmed. The toys are everywhere and he plays with approximately four of them. The rest are just scenery in a room that now looks like a daycare had an estate sale.
Territory two: my 10-year-old’s room. She is my organized one — bless her — but even she cannot keep up with the volume. There is a limit to what any person can organize, regardless of motivation. We are past that limit. The room looks tidy at a glance and then you open a drawer and understand.
The honorable mention: the baby’s room. He has slept in it exactly once in his entire life. Once. So that room — which was supposed to be his room — has quietly become a dumping ground. Things go in. Nothing comes out. At this point I am not entirely sure what is in there. I am a little afraid to find out.
The basement: we will get there. Our board games have been buried down there for over two years. The kids love board games. There is space to play them. But can anyone get to them through the clutter? Absolutely not. That is its own project, its own post, possibly its own therapy session. The basement is coming — just not today.
Why Getting Rid of It Is Harder Than It Looks
Decluttering kids’ stuff is not just a logistics problem. It is an emotional one.
There is the guilt — what if they want this later? There is the memory — I remember when she carried that stuffed animal everywhere for eight months straight. There is the particular ache of going through infant toys again when you thought that chapter was closed, and realizing that some of what you got rid of, you now need again.
And then there is the kid themselves — who has not touched a particular toy in four months but the moment you pick it up to donate it, suddenly it is their most treasured possession and they cannot possibly live without it.
I do not say this to make you feel bad for finding it hard. I say it because I found it hard, and I needed someone to tell me that was normal before I could push through it.
The stuff is not just stuff. Some of it carries memory. Letting go of it requires more than a trash bag and a firm attitude. It requires permission — permission to keep a few things, to feel sad about some of it, and to also recognize that a toy no one reaches for is not serving anyone from the bottom of a bin.
What We Did (With the Kids, On Purpose)
I made a choice this round that I had avoided before: I did this with them.
Not all four at once — that would have been chaos wrapped in chaos and covered in argument. One kid at a time. Simple system.
Three boxes: Keep, Donate, Ask Mom.
Keep is theirs to decide. Donate is stuff they genuinely do not care about. Ask Mom is the middle ground — things they are unsure about, things I might want to save, things we need thirty seconds to talk through before deciding.
Time limit: thirty minutes per kid. After that, decision fatigue kicks in and everything becomes Keep, which is the opposite of the goal.
A few things that helped:
- Framing donations as going to another kid who would actually use them — not going in the trash
- Not fighting over the stuff that mattered to them, even if it seemed silly to me
- Being honest about my own process (“Mom is also getting rid of things she does not use”)
- Having a physical box ready to go in the car so donations left the house the same day
The 16-month-old was not helpful. The 16-month-old took toys out of the donate box and tried to eat them. He was not invited back to the process.
What Stayed, What Went, and Why
We filled four boxes for donation.
What stayed: a contained set of age-appropriate toddler toys — fewer options, better play. The art supplies. The outdoor toys. The Legos, because we will never in our lives be free of the Legos, and I have made peace with that.
What went: every duplicate, every toy that required batteries but had lost the will to live, every Happy Meal toy that had been accumulating since 2021, every little plastic thing from a goody bag that has never once brought anyone genuine joy. The giant pile of “educational” TikTok purchases that looked great in a video and sat untouched in real life — most of those went too.
The living room after: not perfect. Not magazine-worthy. But you can walk through it without stepping on something. The 10-year-old’s room is breathing again. And my youngest — with fewer choices, less visual noise — is actually playing more intentionally than he was before.
Less really is more. I did not believe that until I watched a 16-month-old light up over two toys instead of drowning in twenty.
Up Next: The Drop Zone
The toys are in progress. The kitchen is in progress. Next week we are hitting the spot that has quietly haunted me since the day we moved in: the area by the front door.
Shoes. Backpacks. The dog’s leash. The permission slip from something I cannot identify. The corner where good intentions go to die.
Week 6. We’re going in.
