I’ve found that as Wyatt gets older, the toys he plays with have more and more parts and pieces to them. We were doing a pretty good job of keeping them off the floor by throwing them in baskets and bins, but I found that when they got mixed up, Wyatt had a hard time pulling all the parts of a particular set together and he would get frustrated looking for missing pieces.

I was looking for a way to help him pick up his toys and keep them sorted on his own so I decided to try putting picture labels on his toy bins. The first thing I did was dump all of his toys on the floor and sort them out into different bins. I came up with several broad categories:

• trains and train tracks
• train set “destinations”
• play food and kitchen stuff
• stuffed animals
• plastic animals and safari toys
• vehicles
• construction toys and tools

Next, I photographed a few toys from each of the bins. I took two photos of the toys from each category with different toys in each. I wanted to give Wyatt lots of clues about what went where. Then I printed the photos out and glued one to each side of a piece of chipboard. Wyatt helped me punch a hole in each one and then I tied the tags to the handles of the bins.

The next step was to teach Wyatt how to use the new system. As I was working on the project, I explained the idea behind it to him and then when I had the bins all finished, I pulled some toys out of each bin and mixed them in a pile on the floor. I told him we were playing a “game” and handed him each toy one at a time and asked him where it went. He had a couple of false starts at first, but he quickly got the idea of the “game” and started putting the toys in the correct places all on his own.

I didn’t have very high expectations about how long this whole sorting thing would last, but I have to say that I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Wyatt still isn’t putting his toys away on his own, but he’s a lot better about keeping them all together and we have fewer missing pieces floating around the house. I think it’s also been a help to Zach and I, prompting us to keep the toys more organized.

Over the past month, I’ve embarked on a couple of craft projects to spruce up Wyatt’s room and keep it a little bit better organized. We’ve got a few really nicely framed cowboy prints that Aunt Erin and Uncle Bon-Bon gave him on one wall of his room, but the other walls are a bit bare. I want Wyatt’s room to be a cheerful place that he likes to play in, so I decided to make this flag garland to hang on one of the bare walls.

It was very simple. First, I cut a nice long piece of string. I didn’t measure it, I just eyeballed it. Next, I cut a bunch of flags out of scrapbook paper. I wanted red so the garland would be bright and match the rest of his room, so I just pulled a bunch of sheets with red in them. Next I cut the individual flags. You can probably figure out how to do this on your own, but if you can’t quite get it, Rookie Moms has a basic tutorial here. Once I had all the flags cut, I folded the flap over, applied glue and then glued the sheets over the string.

Here are a couple of close-ups of the flags:

And here it is hanging up in Wyatt’s room. We made a pink garland too because Wyatt decided he liked pink better than the red, so now we have one of each!