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[quote=Anonymous]A few things that really helped me:

-Getting toys reasonably organized. Reasonably organized meaning a bin for trains and tracks, another bin for costumes and accessories, another bin for legos, and so on, plus one final bin for all the random crap.  When kids know where to find what they are looking for, they are less likely to dump out entire boxes looking for that one little toy car they want.  There's a balance, though - too organized and it gets hard to clean up at the end, as I learned when I tried to organize their legos by piece type.

-Once the toys are organized, keep them that way.  That requires some enforcement of the organizational scheme at first - reminding them trains go in the train bin, etc, and also just putting things in the right bin yourself at first until they catch on. Having signs with pictures on the bins helps if they can't see into them.  Cleanup takes slightly longer than just throwing it all in one box, but the messes don't get as big as fast.

-Caving in and buying one of those ugly open storage shelving units to make it easier for kids, especially little ones, to find what they want and to clean up at the end:
 [url]https://a.co/d/cZFVRAE[url]

Also, when the mess is in the basement and I don't want to deal with it, I just avoid the basement until I feel like dealing with it! Dealing with it sometimes means me cleaning, sometimes means making them clean, depending on how the week is going.

Another thing that helps when I am feeling tense about the mess is reminding myself how fast it can be to clean some of this stuff up.  Even though the duplos and toy food have somehow managed to take over the entire basement, it can all be cleaned up in literally five minutes (if I'm the one doing the cleaning).  Doesn't apply to every mess of course, but sometimes even when it looks like a bomb went off, its actually a very fast cleanup and it helps to remember that.

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