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[quote=Anonymous]OP, can you pick a room in which to keep their toys, even if it means sweeping everything in there when the day is done and closing the door?  I am a total Type A person whose house used to look like it was about to be photographed in a catalog on a daily basis.  (Not that we're fancy people, but just that everything was perfectly in its place).  It has been really hard for me because my husband and I are both teleworking without our nanny and of course making three meals a day at home means the kitchen is constantly being cleaned up.

I don't know the layout of your house, but what I have done is keep all the kids' toys (for the most part) in the playroom, and we clean that once a week or so.  The rest of the time I don't even look at it, and when I do, I know it will eventually be cleaned again so I can kind of tolerate it.  Their stuff still ends up around the rest of the house but I make them carry it to where it should live throughout the day and before bed, and my husband has been a big help with the cleaning/neatening as well.  When we do a specific activity, like coloring, I have stopped trying to put it all away back where I want it to be and started letting it live in a pile on top of a shelf.  Same with board games and puzzles - they're now just out more than they used to be.  But for their actual toys (like the fake food that they put in shopping carts like it's their job!), I try to get them to keep it in the playroom and literally just throw it back in there at the end of the day.

I found that creating a schedule for doing certain things helps because (1) I don't feel like I'm doing it all the time because I can look at the schedule and see that I'm only doing it twice a week, for example, and (2) I can generally let some things go when I know they'll be done eventually.

Good luck, OP.  This is hard!!![/quote]

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