This happens to me every year in January — I want to throw out everything and simplify my life.  This year, in addition to my Master Gardener classes, work, and baking bread like a maniac, I’m also reading a parenting book.  I haven’t read one since the kids were born, so it was about time.  The book is Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne.

I’m only about 1/3 of the way in, but one of his recommendations is to dramatically reduce the number of toys in your household.  We don’t have excessive numbers of toys, but I still did manage to get rid of one very large box.  Then I organized the remaining toys in fabric bins from Target — we’ve been using them for a long time because they fit so perfectly on our bookshelf.

The bins were a bit disorganized, so this weekend I dusted off the sewing machine and cut up some old jeans and made these simple labels for them:

I just sewed around the edges and will let the denim get a natural fringe over time.  Adam drew the little pictures with a Sharpie. (Hey, it’s minimalist crafting!) Then I safety-pinned the labels on the boxes — that way if we change things up later they will be easy to remove.  These labels aren’t perfect — the “cars” one has all their four-wheeled vehicles in it, and the Barbie one also has ponies in it, but we tried to keep it as simple as possible.  We did need two whole bins for dress-up clothes:

Wouldn’t Amanda Soule be proud of me right now?  I’d like to think so…  And I will definitely post a review of the book when I finish it.