Organizing Toys for Kids With Visual Sensitivities

In my last post I talked about how much Bean's behavior has been changing, and how I am struggling to not only cope, but to find others that are going through the same thing.

Through chatting with a few others that reached out, I am back on my game now.  I am still going to take him to the doctor (which is a mess of situation worthy of another post in, and of itself) but I am going to try some new things in the meantime.  Some of those I detail in the comments section of the post, so I'm not gonna relay them here, too.  However, one thing that occurred to me was that maybe it was time to do another de-cluttering of Bean's toys. He tends to get really overwhelmed easily when he has too many choices. I try to keep his amount of available toys to choose from neat, organized and at a minimum to help him. For some reason, it hardly ever occurs to him to dig through toy boxes to find his favorite items. If he can't find something in his line of vision to play with he will just not try, which renders him bored, and irritable.  I am aware that the totality of the situation does not rest on the organization of his toys, but I do think it might help.

I thought to myself as I was preparing to do my usual cleaning routine that if my son does well with certain things in certain orders than maybe  others might benefit from it, too, so here is my tutorial on how to help arrange play areas for children with visual sensitivities:

First- Gather all toy boxes

Sort by category. All the electronic toys go together, cars, balls ect  get their own place.

 

 The next thing I do is count how many toys I have in each category. Half of each category is going in the attic to be switched around 6 months later.  He has 2 toy boxes that I keep in 2 different rooms, to help minimize clutter. Here comes some math! For example, Beans has 16 electronic toys. 8 Of those will be put away upstairs. That leaves 4 for each of his remaining toy boxes. I know some parents would be all spontaneous about what goes where, but see this post about how my autie brain needs rules to understand why I can't do that..

This is the box that stays in his room.

This is the other one that I put in the corner where he likes to hang out, as you can see!

This is the box that gets put away.

This is the box that I determined no one plays with anymore, so they're being taken out of the rotation.

 And here is Beans playing with some paper after I organized his toys! :) He has been having fun playing with them all. Every time I organize his toys he always seems to be so happy, like it's Christmas.