Babies: 6 - 9 Months
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Do you have a small house? what do you do with everything?
we live in a 3bedroom townhome, with no basement. We have a rec room but that is DH office so its far from a safe play area for DD. Right now, the exersaucer, toys, etc are in our living room which is attached to our dining room. Our house doesn't have a ton of play space for DD. we are in no position to move right now, but would like to in a few years if we can. I'm just not sure how to make more room or what to do wiht all her toys and i know its only going to get worst with more toys! I have a bin behind the couch with a lot of her toys and eventually when she's too old for the PNP I'll be able to get that out of the way to make more room.
Just curious what others do!
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Re: Do you have a small house? what do you do with everything?
omg! love your pics! my dd has the same skull hat
We are in a 2 bed/2 bath condo. It's basicially the 2 bedrooms/baths, a large open "family" room that is our living/dining/office, the kitchen, tiny laundry room and a small balcony. We have no basement/attic nor garage. To add to that, we both work from home.
The key for us, is to maximize storage and minimize "stuff". In both bedrooms there are walk in closets. So I added a ton of shelving, pretty much floor to ceiling on the back walls. I also added shelving in the laundry room above the washer/dryer. In the family room we have furniture that has great storage and I use baskets to hide stuff.
We purposely have to keep the "stuff" way down. In her nursery, there is a crib, twin bed with trundle, a double dresser and a bookshelf with baskets for toys/storage. Her dresser doubles as a changing table, and I put shelving with more baskets above the dresser.
We have a swing (almost done with it), a play mat/yard thing, a bouncy seat and a door jumparoo. Oh and a RNP next to my side of the bed, which doesn't get used much. That's it for baby gear. No PnP, no jumparoo, no activity center. There just isn't room. I may get a small activity center when she is done with the swing.
We have very few toys as she doesn't need many at this age, and even as she gets older we will only have what we have room for. We can't have everything. I figure, whatever we don't have, between daycare and friends houses, she will get to play with a wide range of toys.
We have frends constantly trying to give us hand me downs and I respectfully turn them down (unless its something we truely need and would buy ourselves anyway). Also my husband's family buys way too many things for DD that we don't need/want/have room for. We have told my MIL time and time again to stop but she cannot help herself. So I donate or consign most of that.
We have a 2 bedroom townhouse with no basement or attic. We ended up getting rid of our big dining room table to make more room for DS and his things. Now our dining room is a play room where we keep his larger items like his exersaucer and push toys. Even though I miss having the nice table, I like that DS has a room with lots of open floor space. I keep his smaller toys and stuffed animals in storage baskets(one in his room and one in the living room).
Where we're running into trouble is storing the things he's outgrowing, but we want to save for #2. His swing and bouncer are still set up in his room and his closet is packed full with clothes, his infant seat/bases, etc. We're hoping to move to a larger place within the next 2 years, but we may end up storing some items at our parents' homes for the time being.
We have a 2 bedroom apartment--we keep things for the baby in both spacious rooms-the second bedroom has his crib and our living room has our changing table.
We just sent our Graco Snugride Infant Car Seat and Frame Stroller plus our Puj Tub to my inlaws. They are going to store it at their house which has more room. Baby is about 20 lbs, and he is ready for his Graco Stroller and the Britax Convertible Car Seat. So tomorrow is the his first day in those items.
I honestly do not have a lot of toys for him. There are a couple of cute stuffed animals. And I have a Baby Einstein bouncer, play gym, and entertainer. He also has a quilt that he plays on. he really does not have a preference. He is teething, so he just wants to put things in his mouth.
I recently got him his first chair and a nursery horse rocker from Pottery Barn Kids. But we are still working on this, and he has not got it yet--he still cannot sit up on his own, but he is about to crawl.
And as he gets bigger, I have to be smart on what to keep and what to give away to Goodwill. I was thinking that I might sell some things.
He goes to daycare, and they have more toys there. As a mother, I just do not want to go overboard at this point with toys-I figure less is better--at least, until he really has a preference. And when he gets older, I will probably get some storage items at Pottery Barn Kids or Storables so that I can keep everything better organized.
Right now we live in a 2BR 1B apartment on the military base we live on. It actually works really well only because half of our bigger furniture is in the garage because we just moved in after DH came home from Afghan. We're moving in a few weeks to an apartment in AL with a little more footage which is really only the extra bathroom and I have no idea how this is going to work. DS has a lot of toys so this will be interesting.
I look at the floorplan almost everyday to try and plan out how to put our stuff in and I really have no idea.
We are in a 900sqft 2bed/1 bath condo. We have no garage to store 'garage stuff' like tools (those are in our closet). We have no linen closet, spare towels and bed linens are also in our closet...along with the Christmas decorations, birthday wrapping paper, clothes and shoes. Our office desk is next the bed, printer is in our closet.
DD has the other room, she kicked our office into our room due to the dangers of having wires and what not around her. Her closet is packed with everything else that we can squeeze in there besides her clothes. My parents are storing a lot of other items like camping gear, paint cans and baby stuff that she has out grown out of up at their house.
We have three dogs and it's packed, I'm driven to occasional panic attacks over it. Obviously there's no room right now for another baby...no TTC until we figure out what we're going to do with the space issues.
On top of all this, we have a unit above us and to the side of us, it's jammed packed and the walls are thin, I can hear the guy above us both snoring and peeing. When he walks above our dining room table, our lamp vibrates. Hence the panic attacks..I feel like the walls are literally coming in at me sometimes.
we have an ottoman that opens up and so i put a bunch of his toys in there. The swing has already gone to storage, so the only bigger toy we have out is the jumperoo.
to help on space I do 2 things.
1. I just simply don't buy that many toys. He really doesn't need that much, and the more toys he has, the more clutter it is.
2. I rotate his toys. Every couple of weeks I put away some toys into a bin in his closet and take out some. That way all of the toys aren't out at once. It helps a lot and the toys don't seem to get boring that way either.
A kiss he will never forget- Disney World 2014
Bar tab = $156,000, Bus to Foxwoods = $0, Puking in the Stanley Cup = Priceless
We try to keep the stuff down. The biggest thing we ever had out was the jumperoo, but DS didn't care for it, so we didn't even have it for that long and then decided to donate it, not store it for the next baby. Before DS was born, we got rid of our coffee table and replaced it with two storage ottomans, one which we use to store all his smaller toys. The only "big" toys he has are an activity table and a walker, which remain out in the living room all the time, but they are not that huge. We put away his little toys every night. He also has a toy basket in his room for a bunch of little toys.
Fortunately, we have a small attic space, so we keep the clothes he grows out of in there along with anything we might be keeping for the next baby, like his car seat. If we didn't have that, than we might look into keep that stuff at one of our parents' houses.
Thanks!!
I love that hat, came with matching mittens too 
Thank you!
I love that hat, we got matching mittens too 
I think it's a toddler hat, and she's got a pretty big head so it fits perfectly. My favorite infant hat of hers doesn't cover her ears anymore so it's pretty useless. she barely got to wear it. Boo.
(and I tried replying last night.... however the internet was being stupid then DH and I got into it over stupid crap haha, and I haven't been home all day... _)
Edit: apparantly it *did* post last night, maybe I should have read the whole thread. Ok, that's a sign it's time for me to go to bed. Sorry ladies!