A New Tradition

We started a new Christmas Eve tradition this year.  We gathered a bag of Lauryn and Lucas's toys, ones they don't play with, and left them by the tree for Santa to take with him.  We leave him a bag of toys, and he brings new gifts.  I'd heard about this a while back and thought it was a great idea!  Our kids have been very fortunate, and have an insane amount of toys.  They don't play with quite a few of them, so this was a good way to clean out some clutter.  The toys that Santa took will be donated.  I told Lauryn about leaving the toys for Santa and she wondered what he would do with them.  I told her that he would take them back to the North Pole with him, make them all shiny and new again, and deliver them to good boys and girls around the world next year.  She thought that was a neat idea, was happy to go through all of their toys with me, deciding which ones would be good for Santa to take, and we filled a garbage bag full.  I'm so proud of my sweet girl and I think this will be a great new tradition.

Donating Toys

I've been talking to Lauryn quite a bit lately about donating some of her toys.  Being 3, I didn't think she fully understood what I meant but when I told her that she has so many toys, and there are so many kids who don't have toys to play with, I think she started to get it.  In the next few days, we're going to go through all of her toys and books and decide which ones she'd like to give away.  When we're talking about it, she gets very ambitious and wants to give all her things away.  I think that's very sweet but she's talking about giving her bike away and that's something she uses every single day.  I try to tell her that we want to give away the things that we don't use, mostly because she has a million toys that she never plays with and when she's looking for a certain toy, the rest of them get scattered everywhere!  I really want her to help me with this so she'll understand what we're doing and she'll want to do it again other times.  So basically, I have two reasons to want to do this.  To teach her about helping others and to get rid of the massive amount of toys that are all over this house!