The One-Minute Clean-Up Game

I must have read about this idea somewhere, because I could never have come up with a house-cleaning idea all on my own:

Start in the family room, which is full of toys that actually belong in the living room*. Tell Isaac we're going to play the One-Minute Clean-Up game, which means we're going to fill the little shopping cart with as many toys as we can in only one minute. Set the timer and yell "Go!" with great enthusiasm. Quickly fill the shopping cart with toys, all the while calling exhortations of haste. When the timer goes off, abruptly stop picking up toys and run with the shopping cart into the living room. Swiftly empty the toys into a laundry basket waiting there. Now you're done!

The first time I tried this, I got one minute's worth of cleaning up out of Isaac, and that was it. (Although that one minute made a pretty big difference!) But when I tried it again tonight, he really enjoyed it -- and in fact he insisted that we keep doing it. We must have played the One-Minute Clean-Up Game seven or eight times in a row, which added up to a lot of minutes and a lot of cleaning.

We eliminated all the toys after the first two or three rounds, so then we had to move on to items that belonged in other parts of the house -- taking books to Isaac's room, waffle maker to the pantry, clothes to the laundry hamper, markers to the art box, and so forth. This wasn't quite as easy as dumping toys haphazardly in a basket, but Isaac didn't seem to mind. Eventually I didn't even set the timer -- I just yelled "Go!" and he got to work. He ran down the hall pushing his shopping cart and having a wonderful time.

By the time we were through, he'd picked up his stuff from the family room, hall bathroom, master bedroom, and guest bedroom. This idea may never work again, but I relished it while it lasted.

It's not like the house is actually clean, though. For one thing, there's a laundry basket in the living room that contains three or four shopping carts' worth of unsorted toys. For another, we didn't tackle the rest of the living room, where Craig and Isaac have been playing for several days.

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*You could call the living room our "playroom," but that would be short-sighted. "Play" happens in every room of the house, often with items that are not actually toys (such as the waffle maker). However, the living room has a large open carpeted area, which makes it ideal for playing on the floor. And it also contains our toy storage system.

This homegrown system involves containers and a rigid system of taxonomy. There are eleven smallish clear plastic bins which contain eleven different types of toys: tools; dress-up items; little vehicles; plastic people and animals; stuffed people and animals; building blocks; other types of blocks; puzzles; sorting toys; Duplo; and toys for babies. There is one large tub which long ago became much too small to actually contain all of the big vehicles, so there is overflow parking all around it. There is a wooden box for musical instruments. There are two stacking metal containers on the table that serves as the pretend kitchen: one for dishes and one for food. And, the thorn in my side, there is one medium-sized plastic bin which contains objects I couldn't fit into my filing system. (Yes, I am a librarian.)

Craig and I have very different styles of working with this system. With Craig, Isaac can dump out any bin that strikes his fancy, which allows for wild cross-pollination of items as they play. After Craig and Isaac have been playing, it's not unusual to be unable to step into the living room, so thoroughly has the floor been covered in items, and many of the bins will stand completely empty. On the other hand, I try to enforce a "one bin at a time" policy. Well, some toys do go together, so I'll allow the tools and the dress-up clothes, or the little vehicles and the blocks. But I do regularly say, "No, you can't get out the Lego until we've put all the blocks away."

Yes, Craig is more fun to play with!