How to clean a play room

For the past week (okay, maybe three weeks) the play room has gotten consistently more disorganized. We take down toys and somehow they get scattered all over the house. The next thing you know we have blocks, babies, bead necklaces, and whistles all over the living room floor. And at the end of the day when we're trying to pick up the clutter, instead of putting each thing away in its respective place, I've been loading up baskets here and there and labeling them (in my mind) "to put away in playroom tomorrow". But that never happens. Instead of putting them away, the toys sit in the basket quite nicely out of the way and are forgotten. So the girls find new toys to bring out. And the cycle gets worse and worse until you're so sick of looking at baskets full of mismatched toys that you decide to tackle the monster.
And that's what we did today.
I found every basket, bin, container in the house that had toys in it and I dumped them in the middle of the floor.


The girls love when I do this because they get to sit in a pile of chaos and have their pick at whatever toy they want.

So I sort, and sort, and sort, and sort. And today I actually started throwing things away. Like old broken happy meal toys, incomplete decks of cards that are all bent, broken crayons, and old pieces of paper that I had started a grocery list on before Ava took it from me and started drawing on it.
45 minutes later the room looked like this.

And finally, once all the bins had been put away...


Ahhh, a clean floor.

And as I was putting away the last few things, I noticed the girls had disappeared. I found them in the office with some toys I had JUST organized. (see them hiding behind the ottoman-laundry basket-chair barrier?)

It never ends...