Toy chaos

Once a week or so, I feel the strong urge to reorganize the kids' toys. Daily evening cleanup is certainly faster and easier when you just dump toys into the big toy drawer. But once a week I feel the need for a "deep clean" -- I just have to put parts together with their toy. I have to put cars and planes in the "things with wheels" drawer and I have to line up the books in the bookshelf according to size and language. I explain to Tobey that when we organize the toys, it's easier to find the toys you want or know the toys you're missing...or even learn something new about your toys like that the remote control car came with 3 coal balls instead of 2 (I had never seen 3 together until last week).

When I do reorganize the toys, inevitably there's a part missing. A cup from a 12-cup set, an egg from our toy half dozen, a giraffe from Noah's Ark. When we had fewer toys, a smaller condo and one less kid, I'd actually look for the lost part because there was time and energy and I'd feel like there was one thing in my world that had order when I found it. Nowadays, I just log in my overfull brain that the egg set is incomplete (and Noah's Ark is always missing something different each time) and keep my eye out for the part in the following days.

However, it never ceases to amaze me how long a toy or a toy part can be lost and then turn up again months, even a year later. We were given a set of 12 stacking cups at Tobey's 1st Christmas (4 months old) and 3 years later, I can report we still have all 12 cups, at least the last time I organized, we did. It's this strange phenomenon that gave me confidence to comfort Tobey when he lost his cherished "lucky day" blue ball. I felt bad that he lost it but I was certain it would turn up again in the house. It sure did, a couple weeks later. This phenomenon works because we don't really let the kids take their toys out of the house, maybe into the car but almost never out of the car. I let my kids live the consequences of their actions a lot but this is one situation that I try to avoid, the emotional pain of a lost toy and the whining that comes with it.

What led me to finally blog about this mundane reality of any household with kids is that the other day I saw the toy lunch box and picked it up. It felt heavy so I was curious what was inside: our 6 play eggs perfectly placed inside. For weeks now, every time I organized the toys, I had a different incomplete set of egg parts, 3 bottoms 4 tops or 5 tops and 1 bottom, etc. I thought I'd never find them all at the same time. But instead of searching high and low or nagging Tobey to find them, there they all were, a surprise not just to find them, but to find them somewhat organized, as if I discovered that an alien lifeform had intelligence.

This toy chaos got much worse when Eli started walking. Eli has a special gift for relocating toys. He would pick up toy 1 in room 1, walk over to room 2, find interest in toy 2, promptly drops toy 1, walks to room 3 with toy 2, etc. And because of this, I now blame Eli for everything lost. After our first visit to the Y with my brand new $2 flip flops, one was missing. I searched Lost and Found, kept an eye for it around the house, to no avail. I gave up after a week figuring that it fell out of my overstuffed Y bag and put the leftie in the garage. A few days later, Eli greets me while I was coming out of the shower holding a flip flop, the rightie.

And so last week when my hair gel was missing from my Y bag, I cursorly checked Y Lost and Found but secretly waited for Eli to turn up with it a few days later. A few days later, I realized it was at the bottom of my bag the whole time. Sorry, Eli.

The toy chaos not only includes finding missing parts, it's also the ubiquitous toy parts. The toys with the parts that no matter how often you put them away, they turn up somewhere and everywhere. It's the wayward lego you find in every room. Our numerous empty gift cards that we play cash register with. The plastic coins, a penny here, a nickel there. You can think your house is tidy enough for company, and then you spot a lego next to the piano leg or under the TV stand. It's like when we had an ant problem in the house and we'd kill the trail but there was always one ant that got away.

The toy chaos was at first infuriating, an indication of chaos in my house and how I have no control over things as a mom. But now it's a little more endearing, evidence that kids live in this house, especially when I find little surprises like when I opened the refrigerator and found Eli's teething lobster (the only toy that makes sense to have in the refrigerator), a matchbox car and that blue ball. It was strange, it was creative, it was cute. It was a sign that a child had played there.