As a mother of young children you may sometimes feel like you are overwhelmed with baby gear. If you are a new mom or you’ve recently added a new baby to an established family of older children, you probably feel especially overwhelmed with baby items. Is there any relief for families that feel overrun by gear for their kids? How can a mom simplify?
Do not despair! There is hope for relief. There are a few things you can try to help manage the loads of “mommy paraphernalia” piling up around you. Try 3 simple steps to help simplify your life: organize, prioritize, and consolidate.
Organization is the first thing to do. Your organizational goal should be to help everything find a place. Sounds doable right? But sometimes it’s easier said than done, especially if you live in tight quarters. Start by using buckets or bins as storing places. Devote these storage bins for baby items that are not being used. This will help keep baby gear from cluttering your living spaces.
Additionally, you can use wall space to manage your clutter. Organizational tactics like using wall space are great because it puts your walls to great use, when usually walls are just used for decoration. Here is a specific example. Clear a baby sling from lying about by placing it on a hook right by your front door. This makes the baby sling accessible when you are on your way out the door. Using wall space will keep your gear out of the way without having to throw loved things away.
Next, work on prioritizing. Prioritizing refers to looking at all your baby gear and determining what is the most important. This step will be different for every mom. There are some items that you may feel are essential, and others that are just nice to have around every once in a while. Once you have prioritized, then you can put highly important items in the most convenient places, and lower priority items can be tucked away.
For a prioritizing example, let’s use our baby sling one from above. Every mom knows how much they use their sling. It may be used several times a day on walks or for use doing your chores. If this is the case you’ll need your baby sling in an easily accessible place (i.e. hanging on a mud room hook, or on a hat rack). However, if you only use your sling a few times a week, say for grocery shopping trips and such, then you may be safe hanging it in a coat closet.
Now let’s talk consolidation. This is the step that can get difficult! Once you’ve organized and prioritized, you may want to look into consolidating your gear, or in other words ditching your unused items.
Let’s use our baby sling example once again. Because a baby sling does the same job that an infant stroller does, consider consolidating so you don’t have double the items doing the same jobs. Infant strollers are big, bulk and only used for a few months anyway. Knowing this, your infant stroller could be a great candidate for consolidation measures. Donate excess items to people who are in need of baby items. You will do yourself a favor by clearing clutter from your life, and the recipient will appreciate new baby items.
ModMum baby wraps and baby slings specializes in baby slings and baby wraps, babies slings, babysling. We are passionate about baby slings and baby wraps, Lisa and other mom’s give great parenting advice and share tips to enjoying their babies on the blog. Come visit anytime.