how do you keep toy sets organized?

[Anonymous]

For example we have a lot of play kitchen yet which my kid loves using. But it's all ended up in one big bin with the cake decorating pieces, and the icecream kit, and the bbq kit etc all mixed in together and impossible too use any individual thing activity. It's fine for him to use them together but he actually enjoys playing "birthday" or something with the cake also. And if they're all just going to be treated as general food then we don't need a giant pile of it.

So that's just one example - but how do you keep yours organized? If you store it in little boxes, have you found an easy product for that? Is your kid able to help clean it up when it requires sorting? Do you get a bunch out at once or would you only get out say the bday cake and use the bbq set entirely separately after you're done playing bday?

[Anonymous]

I used to sort stuff. By kid 2 being a toddler, I gave up. My kids don't sort things in small bins very well (our craft room is still sorted into small bins of supplies and it's a bear requiring lots of parent help to keep it that way, even though the kids are old enough to do so). When they want to play "birthday," they pull out all the cake pieces they can find and make do with whatever's still buried under the pots, pans, and vegetables.

We do let kids mix toys, but my friends who have kids clean each item up between different toys seem a lot more relaxed than I am, so take that FWIW.

[Anonymous]

Depends on the toy, but we use a variety of bins. We have a fabric bin for all the wooden blocks, a fabric bin for the wooden train stuff, a play kitchen where we keep the play food, things with small pieces go in smartstore totes with internal dividers from the container store (my child just got into playmobil at Christmas--so mostly for this). We have a set of Ikea kallax shelves that most of these go on. My kid is just starting to get the idea of sorting toys out to put away--helped by the rules in her preschool classroom she just moved into at age 3. Younger than that I did most of the work to keep things sorted out.