Thursday, January 31, 2008

Mount Playmobil

Last night I tackled and conquered Mount Playmobil.

We bought Angel - who adored swings as a tiny - a Playmobil swing set for Christmas when she was three, and from then on it became our standby gift choice for birthdays and Christmas for both girls. Over the years we gathered a veritable mountain of the stuff, and very well used it was too until Angel and latterly Star outgrew it (in Star's case mainly because she likes a playmate and Angel will no longer oblige).

Little Cherub has been enjoying playing with a tractor and some farm animals, so I decided the time had come for a major assault on the Playmobil boxes. After nearly three hours work I have sorted out various toddler-friendly sets - farm, zoo, furniture, cars, playground and a selection of people. There are also a number of larger items she can play with - a bus, an aeroplane, a caravan, a motorhome, a fire engine, a helicopter, an ambulance and a swimming pool, some of which I had even forgotten we owned! Now they are all nicely organised I can easily rotate them into her toy boxes. Today she has been having a lovely time with cars, the bus and some playground items, including the original swing set. What goes around, comes around!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a huge project! Good for you! Playmobil is relatively new in our lives, and I need to find a way to keep it a bit under control. The big problem here is my son's imagination is huge, and the whole house is the playing area.

The Bookworm said...

Jenn, I found that as my two got older they actually liked having all the Playmobil jumbled together. Hunting for what they wanted was part of the fun, and they liked to mix things from apparently quite different sets. My storage solution was these storage units from Ikea, with a mix of deep and shallow drawers. As long as all the Playmobil found its way back into those at the end of the day, I was happy. And I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to find how few missing items or parts there were when I sorted through, despite the muddle it was in.

I also had a six drawer version of this to keep very tiny bits in, but they rarely stayed there and it was time consuming to sort things into the drawers. In the end even the little bits stayed in the plastic tubs. I've sorted them all back into the wooden drawers for now, but only because it will be a while before Little Cherub is big enough to have them.