Diary of Spain in Lockdown - Operation Toys

Monday 13^th April  Easter Monday

Back in February we fumigated our basement as it seemed to be housing some unwanted visitors of the fast-moving, six-legged kind. Everything in it now needs to be properly cleaned and checked for corpses. So, for the past four days we have emptied, cleaned, sorted and put away fifteen years’ worth of toys. Well, not so much of the putting away yet, my living room still looks like the toy section of a department store.  It’s been exhausting, it’s been tedious, but it’s also been fun finding old friends from when the older girls were little. Even my most adolescent daughter, although she would never admit it, has enjoyed it too, despite saying she would prefer to sell the lot on Wallapop!

If confinement is starting to feel a bit like Groundhog Day, well this cleaning of toys definitely is. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. And by the end of the fourth day I must admit to losing my rag a bit when all four of my daughters were slumped in front of the telly, surrounded by debris and I was alone outside carting boxes of toys from one place to another. Again.

They do say, though, that to get tidy you first have to make a mess. Don’t they? Someone must have said it, at some point. I’m trying to stay positive. Most of the toys, with the exception of the Sylvanian Families and the small Lego (as opposed to Lego Duplo) have now been washed, dried and sorted and are sitting in a selection of old crates and shoe boxes, waiting for Ikea to deliver 10 more storage boxes!!!

When the boxes finally do make the 29km journey to our house, the biggest problem will then be, where on earth to store all these boxed up toys? I promised the girls we wouldn’t have to condemn them to the damp, potentially cockroachy basement, so I now have the incredibly easy task of making space in my house for some thirty-odd boxes of toys.