Seasonal Rotation: Not Just For Clothes!

An old friend and high school classmate has turned his passion for education into a business consulting on parenting to busy moms.  And he knows of what he speaks: a few years ago, he had twins!  One of his articles from last year uses an approach I know from the land of closets but have not seen discussed for kid stuff: seasonal rotation!  Check out his full step-by-step guide: How To Reduce Toy Clutter in Six Easy Steps.

Seasonal rotation is a popular concept for clothes.  The idea is that you store half your wardrobe and rotate it out when temperatures change.  It doesn’t work for me personally because the San Francisco climate is so consistent: it’s pretty much always between 50 and 70 Fahrenheit.  Instead of having a wardrobe divided by season, I have a wardrobe divided by things I can wear at home in SF and things I pretty much only wear while traveling!

For example, I hardly ever wear a heavy coat, but I ALWAYS need a light jacket.  So, the jackets live in my closet within easy reach, and the coats hang in the linen closet that’s a little harder to access.  And shorts are pretty much vacation-only items for me, so I hang them on skirt hangers on the highest, farthest bar in my closet so they don’t take up valuable real estate.

When it comes to toys, I recommend that you think about whether or not the rotation system will work for you in much the same way as you consider seasonally rotating your clothes.  If you and your family have annual habits (heating the pool, putting up Christmas lights, back to school shopping are all good examples) and these are easy for you to maintain and follow, toy rotation might be a great solution for you.  However, if you’re more of an “out of sight, out of mind” household, rotation might lead to a situation in which the stored toys never re-emerge from storage!

As with any organizing strategy, rotation will work for some families and not others, and that’s perfectly ok. Have you tried toy rotation and found it worked for you?

LMW