If you have small children, you have small accessories. A LOT of them. Depending on where you live, that can include mittens, beanies, scarves, umbrellas, sunglasses, hats to protect from the sun, flip-flops – you name it. If you’re lucky, like me, you live somewhere that gets seasonable weather and calls for both cold and warm-weather accessories – double the “stuff.”
I think it was somewhere between the arrival of Kid #2 and Kid #3, that I had finally had enough of trying to keep track of all of those teeny, tiny things. (You can only deal with so many meltdowns as a result of your three-year old not finding his absolute-favorite-can’t-live-without-it pair of sunglasses.) I needed to figure out some sort of easy closet organization system. We didn’t have any place for one of those cute, locker room-style mud rooms that have become so popular. I was stuck trying to make the most of a standard coat closet.
Mail that needs to be opened and sorted. Paperwork coming home from school. Random odds and ends that are going to some other final destination. During baseball season, I probably remove at least three baseballs per week from the counter. (I’m pretty sure that baseballs are breeding and reproducing somewhere nearby – that is the only explanation for their seemingly ever-increasing numbers.)
My boys come home from school and my kitchen island is instantly full of binders, books, reading logs, lunch boxes, water bottles and whatever else they pull out of their clown-car-esque backpacks.