Bins

If there is one bane of my existence besides laundry, it would have to be toy bins. OK, maybe it's not the bins. After all, they do their job, containing toys.

So it's the toys.

All those fine-motor-creative-thinking-skill toys we have. Ever notice how those kind of toys never come as just one? No - they are sets, collections, pieces, that, while not requiring batteries, require storage bins.

And every time I see an empty bin somewhere in the house, I want to throw a tantrum.



Because an empty bin somewhere in the house means that there is, somewhere else in the house, a pile of blocks or train tracks or legos or matchbox cars or miniature search and rescue vehicles (with tiny cones!).



And since that pile is not in said bin, it has likely been scattered to at least the four corners of the room in which it is in, if not through several rooms or into the hall. Which means crawling on hands and knees on hardwood floors to gather, gather, gather and load the bin back up so that insteps are safe in the middle of the night.



Sometimes there are multiple empty bins. Which means multiple piles of small toys, usually scattered and mixed, which means gather, gather, gather and sort, sort, sort.

And since children's play is their work and they "work" even more than they wear clothes (at least around here), this bin/toy thing is at least as futile as laundry, is it not?



What's worse than the discovery of an already empty bin is the sound of the dumping of a bin. Why? Why can't you play like girls and only use one thing at a time and take it out in an orderly fashion and play with it in the way it is intended? Why the dumping?

I have bad dreams about the sound of millions of duplos falling and scattering...

It's because for the boys, the empty bins don't represent piles of toys. They represent something to build or climb or invent or command. There's a world of possibility in that bin once you evict the toys that are supposed to live in it.



And of course, I can't complain about the times when the boys build a train or a boat with the bins and I turn around to see them all cooperating and giggling together.

Put three little brothers in a line-up of empty toy bins calling to me to look at what they made together, and I can actually forget that there are at least three piles of small toys strewn somewhere that later I'll be lumbering through on aching knees, separating kaplas from regular wooden blocks and the Loving Family from the rescue workers (and their cones!).

The piles will always be there, but for a moment they can't be seen or heard above the building and the laughing of my little boys in their bins.