where do all the f*@#n toys go

living room? bedroom? every room in the house?

how do you keep the sedimentary layers of toys playable-with, instead of just settling into a lump, the visible top layer of which gets used and the rest like a kind of potting soil

I think humus a natural phase in the toy cycle tbh

Toys used to go in every room in the house. Then we got the chihuahua, who specializes in eating all of the favorite toys.

At present, toys are officially supposed to go in two places: the "playroom" (our porch, which has closed doors) and his bedroom. However, as I type this, I'm sitting at the breakfast table right now and our fruit bowl has an orange, a lemon, a Push-Pop, a Bubble Gun, and a Batman, and the Thing in it. It's something we're still working on, I guess.

We've found that if you get some small sets of drawers for the toys, our kid will go digging through it out of curiosity. Some toys he won't play with again, but maybe 3/4s of the time he'll surprise me my getting back into some thing that I thought he was way done with.

drawers, ok

are you familiar with the Montessori system Trace? it's bollocks like, but hey interesting sociological experiments.

xp

Yeah, like be warned that the toys won't stay in the drawers or anything, but they can be helpful. And of course, kids love being told that stuff is "theirs", so we told him something like "these are your brand new special big boy drawers so all your toys can have a special home" and that worked for us, ymmv.

You need these, lots and lots of them in every room, shovel toys into crates when kids in bed, job done!