Toys R Me

It was me versus the toys. And I finally won.
For years, I have waged this war with the toys. They multiply. They spread out around the house. They attack you in the middle of the night (I am CERTAIN that a Buzz Lightyear was not in the middle of the hallway when I went to bed).
I often complain about the toys, and I often do it in one of the most annoying ways possible for a spouse. I mumble under my breath and start talking about the toys and kinda stomping around occasionally raising my voice enough so that my wife will hear me say, “...might as well just flush money down the toilet...” The first few times I did this, my wife would engage me in a conversation about the toys and what we could do to corral them. These conversations never went well, because it always culminated with my suggestion that we remove every toy from the house, along with ever other non-essential item in the house. We each get a bowl, a fork and a cup. And one towel each. Pick out a shirt you like, because THAT IS IT. (When you’ve got a Buzz Lightyear stuck to your foot, you tend to go for drastic measures.)
My wife ends these conversations by making this noise that, I think, might have been what small dinosaurs sounded like. Whatever it is, it is definitely the sound of exasperation. She will sometimes roll not just her eyes, but her whole head, and leave the room.
So the other night, my entire family was asleep. I’m a bit of a night owl, so I am often the last one up in the house. And there I was, standing in the playroom, looking at toys and toy pieces and thinking, “...might as well just flush...” when it occurred to me -- hey, everyone is asleep. No one can stop me. It’s me versus the toys, and they have NO ONE here to protect them.
After about 30 minutes, I had thrown every single toy that my kids had in the trash. Gone.
I will now pause to allow for you to offer me an apology for the nasty thing you just said about me. Of course I didn’t throw out my kids’ toys.
In our playroom, we have a closet with some shelves and also a large cabinet that holds a bunch of other toys. Over time, these storage areas have become less than organized, much the way homes become less than organized after a tornado tears through them. So the first order of business was to pull all of the toys out of both areas. After a few minutes, the room was knee-deep in toys. I am not sure where some of these toys came from. I know some were gifts, some were bought and some were hand-me-downs. But the only other explanation for some of them was that they randomly formed over time. Despite the debate that rages in the toy community over toyvolution, it is an undeniable fact. There is simply no way to explain how, in a closet cut off from the rest of the world, two-thirds of a train set that I have never seen in my life can suddenly appear.
As I surveyed the room, it occurred to me that I might have bitten off WAY more than I could chew. However, I knew it would be very bad form to go wake my wife up and say, “Uh, yeah, I pulled every single toy the kids have into the middle of the room for some reason. Could you clean them up?”
I decided the best approach to try and dig out of this mess was to start organizing things in piles. I had a pile for dress-up clothes, a pile for trucks, a pile for dolls, and a pile for puzzles. The final -- and largest -- pile was a pile for everything else. I quickly learned that this approach was not going to work, as the pile for everything else was taking up the better part of the room.
I shifted gears for a different approach. First up -- hang all the dress-up clothes up. If you have a daughter and cannot find a princess dress for her, I apologize, as it is clear that we own them all. My daughter could dress up as a different princess every 15 minutes and would MAYBE be done by the time she’s 40.
The next step was to tackle the trucks and trains. My son loves to play with trucks and trains, but he clearly likes tearing them apart more than driving them around. I weeded out the ones that were no longer functioning toys but rather awkwardly shaped stabbing devices and found we now had a much more manageable group that fit nicely on a shelf.
I continued to tackle individual section of the toy populace, and after a few hours, I noticed that the room was actually coming together. When I came to bed at nearly 2 a.m., my wife awoke and asked why I was coming to bed so late. I told her it wasn’t late, and that she’s dreaming. I was too tired to have to defend my toy tackling.
I awoke the next morning to my wife getting ready. “Hey, go check out the playroom,” I said. She looked at me with concern, as she immediately knew I had done something that could be very bad.
A few minutes later, she came back into the room. “Uh, do I want to know what you did with all of the toys?” I assured her that I had not thrown out anything that was not comparable to a homemade weapon, and gave her the grand tour of the new and improved organization system. She seemed pleased, as did the kids, who were able to find their toys and put them back where they belonged. I am sure this will only last a short while, and things will collapse back into toy chaos soon enough. But that’s OK, because I now know what I need to do. I’ll just throw everything out.