QUICK AND EASY TIP FOR CHILDREN'S PUZZLES

Have you ever walked into a room and found your little one making a "mountain" of toys on the floor for no particular reason? Lately my son has been doing just that. Most days, the hour right after he wakes from his nap involves him playing quietly in his room watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while I attempt to finish up some Thirty One business that I started while he was asleep.  The idea sounds easy enough right? Unfortunately within that small hour, my son manages to turn his room into a landfill; complete with every single piece of clothing in his dresser, all his books from his bookshelf, and most frustrating...every single puzzle he owns.  I walk into his room and for a second cannot process my thoughts because I am overwhelmed with the mess that I now have to help him clean up. Fortunately without much resistance he picks up his clothes and books and puts them away.  However the puzzles are another story altogether.

My 3 year old absolutely LOVES puzzles and we have tons of them.  When he was not even three yet, he was putting together 40-50 piece puzzles...which completely baffled everyone.  Not long after his 3rd birthday he was putting together 100+ piece puzzles. Naturally, the more puzzle pieces a puzzle has, the smaller they are.   So you can understand my frustration when he manages to dump five or more puzzles into a pile mixing them up together.  I usually spend 30 minutes at least trying to figure out what pieces go with which puzzle.  This takes up a lot of time that we could be doing something else, so I started doing something that I remember seeing when I was a child.

Although, I am sure this is nothing new and that many of you moms out there already had this idea. I just wanted to share because it has really saved me a lot of time in the afternoon.  Not only when my son manages to dump all his puzzles into one large pile, but also when he actually puts them together they end up spread out all over our floor and putting them away is much faster and easier now.  Especially when I find a stray piece laying on the floor somewhere.

This is so simple, I just assign each puzzle a number and write that number somewhere on the outer box or tin.  Then with a sharpie, I write that number on the back of each puzzle piece, so it's easy to see which piece goes with which puzzle.  Love it!

SPACE SAVING DVD STORAGE

In an true effort to organize my house, I have decided that the best way is to break my work down into different rooms.  A house with a 2 year old is NEVER going to be completely organized, I have come to accept that. However, the OCD in me has not accepted it.  This week I've really been trying to organize my living room.  With the huge collection of toys that inevitably ends up thrown in the corner of my living room, this has proven to be a bigger challenge than I ever could have imagined.  Pre-kid times, my home was always neat and tidy. Very seldom would there be a pile of mail on the table or clutter in the corner.  However, after my son was born, my living room began to look more like a daycare and less like a home.  And while I admit that I hate the clutter, I wouldn't change my lil human tornado for anything!

One thing in my living room that is a total eyesore, is our DVD collection.  When my husband and I first got married and we combined our DVD collections, we bought a big wooden DVD storage shelf. After a while, we managed to fill the shelving unit and then some.  (When I say "and then some", I mean 600+ DVDs).  And in my opinion, nothing looks tackier than a ton of DVD cases taking up space in my living room.  So I was determined to eliminate some of the clutter by figuring out a way to condense all the movies. 

A long time ago, I saw somewhere online an idea for putting your DVDs in plastic sleeves instead of keeping them in the cases.  So after some searching on Amazon and other online sites, I came across these DVD sleeves that let you put two movies into one sleeve! I found the ones below on Target.com for about $13.99 for 25 sleeves (which fits 50 movies!) Awesome!

I bought a few packages of these sleeves and as soon as I started using them, I went online and order enough packages to fit most of our movie collection! Each sleeve holds 2 DVDs and the case art for both movies! I even put the inserts from inside the cases in there too!  In the picture below on the right, there are 56 movies in those sleeves. Now picture 56 DVD cases and how much room that would take up.



 

Now I can store our whole movie collection in neat little baskets on a shelf instead of all those cases!