Closing down the raceway

After reading The Mommyologist's post about the Lego conspiracy, I got a little bug up my butt and decided to take back the living room. Not from the evil empire of the Legos, but from the hundreds of cars, balls, bats, golf clubs and other toddler paraphernalia that had declared war on my living room and subsequently won.  You would think I ran a small daycare just looking at the amount of toys that are strewn across the living room on any given day. If you have even one child, you know how they can somehow destroy a room with a fervor reserved only for a pack of wild elephants running from a meat-eating predator.

I had this great idea that if we kept a box for toys in the living room, at the end of the day, we would just gather them up and pop them into the box at night. Yeah, I'm a first-time mom.  Somehow that "one" box turned into a mound, stuffed and overflowing. What wouldn't fit just got stacked on either side of it.  You couldn't walk around the couch without stepping on–or over –something that would beep, sing or simply cause you fall on your ass. And then the one box turned into two and then what seemed like overnight, there were three.

Luckily, I have a few years of reprieve from the impending doom of the Lego, since the kiddo is only one and a half, but I have to tell you, if the Hot Wheels are any indicator of my future, I'm afraid, very afraid. I never understood the need for so many of these tiny vehicles, or even how one comes to accumulate the shear number of cars I have seen in many a kiddo's room.  But here we are, having only spent a mere fraction of  the overall lifespan for car accumulation, and I am already looking at a pretty impressive parking lot of shiny metal and plastic. And since the little man currently does not hold a paying occupation, someone is buying these cars. And that someone is me. How does this happen?

And let's not even get started with the balls. The little man is nutty for balls. He thinks he needs to have every single ball he lays eyes on. And for some reason, we have perpetuated his ball addiction with more and more balls. How many balls does a kiddo need? Well, today I counted them. Apparently in the first year and a half he needs 26, because thats how many soccer, golf, basket and base balls he currently has. I got another fantastic idea that I would take all these balls I had rounded up from all over the house and put them in a box of their own. Come to find out, I didn't create a "ball box", I actually created a new game for the little man and a new exercise routine for me. The new game was "take out each ball and throw it", the new exercise routine was "run around and pick them up", only to start all over again once they were all back in the box. On the upside, I might have burned off one or two of the fifty mini peanut butter cups I have eaten in the last two days!

I ended up taking out all three of these infamous toy boxes and going through each one, purging what he didn't play with anymore and condensing down the three boxes into two, plus the ball box. Leaving the the living room toy free and the box much more manageable.

Not how I originally planned to spend my morning, but after reading The Mommyologist's post, I was reminded of the pain a Hot Wheel can inflict on the sole of your foot and decided to close down the raceway. At least for a few hours.