Joan Crawford Made Her Kids Give Away All Their New Gifts; Who Said She Was a Bad Mom?

I'm probably going to heed some of this syndicated columnist's advice for dealing with the deluge of gifts my kids received for Christmas.

Our toy-clutter problem is compounded by a few factors:

1. Our house is small.
2. The kids' bedrooms are smaller.
3. We haven't done much in terms of shelves or storage, other than a lone bookcase and a couple of large bins.
4. We haven't done a great job pruning the stuff from previous gift-receiving events.
5. The kids just get too much shit.

One year we packed away most of Jackson's gifts into the abyss of his closet for that rainy/snowy day when we're trapped in the house and need something new to do. That plan backfired a bit when one of his cousins came over and the two attacked the closet like starving binge-eaters raiding a pantry.

Jackson's Lego collection also continues to grow — I was (and still am) a huge Lego fan, but the 5-year-old has more Lego toys at his age than I ever owned in my lifetime — and the bricks have taken over most of our smaller containers. He has a large plastic bin that holds most of his other junk, though I don't think he's seen the lower layers of it since he was still in diapers.

Sasha has a toy box that can barely close. I have no idea what's in it.

In our basement we have two long large plastic bins suitable for holding Christmas trees or corpses, and these are also filled with enough junk to recreate the Star Wars trash compactor scene.

I don't know how to end this post, so I'll use a barely related anecdote. Back when Jackson was a baby, probably around 18 months old, we started to smell a foul odor in his room. This wasn't alarming at first, since babies, if you weren't aware, often smell terrible, as would you if you enjoyed crapping your pants. After a while Jenn and I thought there had to be a reason for the smell, which was the olfactory equivalent of a dull but increasingly annoying tinnitus.

Though we don't fall into every traditional male/female role, seeking the source of the odor was apparently Daddy Duty. I soon found the cause: somehow, while changing Jackson, one of his hard turds flew out of his diaper and into one of those long plastic bins (we kept one in his room before we bought a proper toy box) and it just festered there.

I had to dispose of the few toys and dolls that were in there, and kept the bin outside filled soapy water for a week. (I was too cheap to throw it away.)

So I guess the lesson is, go through those toy boxes and bins. You never know what you'll find. Read more...