Organizing Batman

Before you proceed to read this post or look too closely at the pictures I’d like to say a couple of things.  First, I am not a hoarder.  Really.  Second, although I’d like to say otherwise, these picture are actual pictures of our playroom, which was formerly my three year old son, Zachary’s (aka Batman) room.  The pictures are not staged or retouched in any way.  This is really what the room looked like after Batman and his sister left for pre-school this morning.  Third, I keep a relatively clean house.  Most of the time you won’t find an errant shoe in the living room, let alone, well, this.

Batman made the decision a couple of months ago that he wanted to sleep in his older sister’s room.  Since his older sister is only five and doesn’t have a well defined sense of her personal space yet, she okayed the idea.

On a pre-school morning much like this one, I moved Batman’s toddler bed into his sister’s room and reorganized the toy cubbies neatly in its place.  It would be easier to keep both spaces clean, I thought, if the toys lived all in one room and the other was just for sleeping and watching Scooby Doo re-runs.  Unfortunately, I underestimated the destructive power of my two little angels.  Since the play room wasn’t very well set up for storing toys in specific places, stuff just got tossed around.  And tossed around.  And tossed around. Both Batman and his sister are very good at remembering that ONE SINGLE TOY THEY JUST HAVE TO HAVE which unfortunately is usually buried at the bottom of the pile, only to be unearthed by a major expedition involving tossing everything in the entire room.

So, after a few weeks of (sort of) trying to keep it clean and organized, and then a few more of trying to ignore the space when I walked by, this was the appearance of the room this morning.

Seriously.  I didn’t do a thing but take the picture.  This is what if really looked like.  I’m not proud of it.  But obviously I have no shame.

After dropping the wee ones at preschool this morning, I made a stop at the local Super WalMart for some supplies.

I bought six really big clear stacking bins, and a couple of little ones. And a box of black trash bags.  Then I went to sorting.  Once I determined the major categories of mess (Balls, Trucks, Dolls, Baby Blankets, Books and Stuffed Animals) I dug in.  It was a couple of hour long process. And very incremental in its momentum.

I found some interesting things along the way.  Including but not limited to:

A fork

5 quarters

An empty (thank god) plastic bottle of chocolate milk

4 shoes with no mates

I filled a black leaf garbage bag to the hilt with broken toys and ripped out pages of coloring books,  and removed two empty boxes which formerly housed diapers.  When I was all done, it looked like this:

Pretty spiffy if I do say so myself.

And I am just certain it will stay looking like this. Because of the bins, you know.  The bins.  Now that there is a proper place for everything it will all stay in its place.  Right.  RIGHT?! I can just hear my friend Shane snickering from here.  And saying “Let’s just see it in a week!”

She’s probably right.  She always is.

Next I tackle the office.