If you have kids, then birthdays can be an exciting time. But it can also be expensive, stressful and somewhat frustrating. This brief article will cover the basics of celebrating birthdays with kids and kids toys, including how to shop for the best deals on toys, how to organize toys, and what to do with the toys that you already have.

If there are children in your household, then a birthday is sure to mean lots of toys. If you’re like most families, you have spent the weeks prior to the big day dashing about town, running from one store to the next, looking for the perfect toys. Do you know what kids toys to buy? How much should you spend on them? And what about the toys that your children already have?

Shopping for kids toys should be done with care. Take the time to look through sale ads, clip coupons, check out stores each week, and even shop online to find the best deals on the must-haves for each year.

We have a rule in our household, and the rule is that we do a miniature “spring cleaning” in the weeks leading up to one child’s birthday. The common areas and bathrooms are easy enough; it’s the kids’ bedrooms that give us trouble. With so many kids toys strewn about, it’s hard to know where to start. But the easiest thing to do is grab two trash bags. One bag will hold broken and old toys that are ready to be discarded, and the other bag will collect those kids toys that can be donated to charities and shelters.

Removing ready-for-trash toys is easy enough, but how do you know what to donate? Well, what comes to mind is an easy rule for household organization: if it hasn’t been used in six months, then chances are it won’t be used, and so it is ready to hit the road. In the case of children and kids toys, that time should be reduced to three months. So there you have it: if a toy hasn’t been played with for three months, give or take a few days, then it’s ready to go.

Once you have cleared out all of the old and are ready for the new, you may be looking at ways to improve storage and organization. I can’t recommend enough a good set of storage bins. They are perfect for organizing kids toys of a variety of shapes, sizes and purposes. These bins are often designed so that they may be stacked on top of one another, and some even come with a plastic or wooden “display shelf” that angles the bins upwards and outwards, which makes accessing the bins to reach for the toys within a simple task.