Organizational Miracle: A Cute Storage Trick when You’re Overrun with Stuffed Animals

I’ll just admit it, my kid is so spoiled. He has way more than he needs and I am more than happy to be able to give it to him. But we have a problem with a stuffed animal addiction. See above pic as evidence. He’s been collecting stuffed animals since before he was born. Some are even mine from when I was young – but who can part with Simba or Patches.

And now, I’m feeling like the house is overrun by said animals. I’ve tried to corral them under the bed. But it just makes me cringe every time I walk in the room. I even tried to have an intervention last year. I sat my son down, told him he had a problem and that we needed to address the actual stuffed elephant in the room. After much resistance and a few crocodile tears, we agreed that we could go through each one and decide to either keep it or donate to someone who didn’t have as many toys.

Starting with the Magic of Tidying Up as guidance, he held each toy and decided if he couldn’t live without it or if it could go have a second life with another kid. An hour and 100 stuffed animals later, we finally finished. He had bravely decided to donate three animals and he absolutely had to keep the other 97. Three! Only three. So that was obviously a complete fail. Maybe six years old was too young to try the Japanese art of organization.

Wallowing in my defeat, I thought I’d wait a while and maybe try again. And then I saw it. So ingenious. So wonderful. So cute. An empty bean bag chair that you stuff with all the stuffed animals in the house. This solved more than one problem, as he’d also been wanting a bean bag chair since they got one in his classroom. After spending all of 60 seconds searching on Amazon, I bought the green striped XL chair. The plain striped pattern was boy-appropriate and fit in with the rest of his decor.

 

I was able to fit every animal in there plus his padded marshmallow man costume! It’s really great and he loves it. The clutter is contained and we have a new lounge chair / crash landing pad. It truly is a miracle, and I’m pretty sure the inventor should receive a Nobel Prize! I give this storage solution 5 stars for convenience, ease and pure ingeniousness.

 

Love,
Sara