Before the re-organisation

A few days before Chinese New Year, Catherine and I were busy re-organising Darius’ toys. They were previously kept in boxes and containers and placed on the Pooh Bear playmat in our living room.

Though that original layout wasn’t really messy, we realised that Darius wouldn’t take  initiative in picking up the toys from the containers and play with them. He would simply ignore the toys in the containers and walked past them day in and out. At the end of the day, we would always see the same layout of the toys as before since he didn’t even bother to touch them at all.

Instead, he would be bringing us books from his bookshelf and asking us to read to him. Of course it’s a good thing that he enjoys reading/listening to stories and books but we wanted him to have a balance in his activities too. Which kid doesn’t enjoy playing with toys and learning through play?

So to start off our organising of his toys, we bought a new shelf (Brand: EXPEDIT) from IKEA and got it delivered a few days later. After putting the pieces together, we cleared his toys to one side after he had slept  and replaced them with the shelf, tucked nicely by one of our walls.

The Pooh Bear playmat was shifted away from the wall so that the shelf would not be resting on it. Catherine had suggested removing the playmat altogether as it was intruding too much into the living room space. We were also concerned that Darius might be more likely to trip over the edges of the mat while walking around the living room area.

As for me, I preferred to still have the playmat in the living area so that Darius could play with his toys more comfortably while sitting on the mat. After some discussions, we decided to leave it as it is and see how things go as we move along.

We then proceeded to sort his toys into the various compartments of the shelf. We had bought plastic boxes and containers from IKEA too to be slotted into some of the compartments. Unlike our existing toy containers, these were shallower and some of them allowed for see-through, thus allowing Darius to see what’s inside them and hopefully tempting him more to pick up the toys.

After sorting out according to the toys’ genre, we had containers containing things like the safari animals, foam alphabets, toy fruits, music toys etc. We also had a container with the other miscellaneous toys, such as small toy cars, rattling toys etc. Besides helping Darius to determine where he could pick out his similar toys, it would also help us in tidying up his toys at the end of the day.

After the toy shelf has been placed

Toys sorted according to their genre

So far, we are glad to see Darius getting more involved with his toys after the re-organisation, taking initiative to take out some of his toys to play with them. Also, after the introduction of the toy shelf, the playmat appears more spacious and the living area is looking neater too. ^^

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