The Great Toy Purge

From December to the end of February we have had Fake Christmas, Hanukkah, Christmas, my daughter's birthday, the joint friend party for both Madison and Jack, the joint family party for Madison, Jack and me and then Jack's birthday. Now that is a lot of excitement and a lot of presents. It happens every year and the children get very overwhelmed and start to act erratically and misbehave more. But I started a new tradition last year, the Great Toy Purge, and it seems to calm everything down.

I have explained to my children that we only have so much space and therefore we can only have so many toys downstairs so they decide which toys they will be leaving downstairs and which are going up in the toy closet for the rest of the year. Then once a month they can swap something of equal size for something in the closet. This way they have new toys to play with every month. This also gives my children a sense of choice and responsibility for their own toys. They make a lot of the decisions together as a team and therefore teaches them to work together to get what they want.

It is a week later and I have seen a drastic change in both my older children towards me and towards each other and their younger brother.