Play

This is the girls' play area, also known as our living room. This is the place they, mostly Elsa, does her best discovering and development of her imagination. The level she does this is massive, bordering on destructive. This is the room before, early in the morning before their sweet little hearts have stirred.

 Here is the room about five minutes after Elsa has made her entrance.

She just can't help herself, she has to pull everything off the shelf, has to learn, has to explore. She often pauses to do a little of this. No real baby toys here, we don't purchase much in that department, but as you can see, Elsa is doing just fine with the lack of plastic toys some genius designated appropriate for a twelve to eighteen month old child. All you see has pretty much been given to us by our generous friends and family, and we all know kids enjoy boxes and brooms and rolls of toilet paper and garbage cans better than that crap anyway. 

Each day/night as we do yet another clean up, I attempt to put things back in their place and inevitably throw a ton of stuff away. Where do all the tiny pieces of plastic that settle on the bottom of the toy box come from? Its overwhelming. 

I recently tried to do away with the toy box or toy basket in our case to try to be more in tune with the Montessori philosophy of having a place for everything so the girls can put things back in their place after playing, resulting in a tidy play area to hopefully cut down on the chaos and clutter in the girls brain, but its almost impossible. For me at least. Never fails, we are in a rush and the toys have to go somewhere and inevitably they get shoved in the basket and the cycle continues until I do another mass toy clean out and pitch a ton of stuff.

But the girls are happy and I am learning a happy child ranks way higher on my list of important things in my life than a tidy house does. So play on Elsa, destroy play on.