Mom Hacks in Real Life: A Rant

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Every day I open one of my social media accounts and find some post all about “Mom Hacks,” or ways to make your life easier. Some are useful, especially writing dosages on the medicine bottle with a sharpie or breaking the bottom off the cupcake and sandwiching the frosting between the two halves. If you have never tried it, it is truly life changing.

But allow me to rant on the toy and craft organizational “Mom Hacks.” These are the upcycling and reusing of everyday household items to make your children’s play areas Pinterest worthy everyday. But as a mom who has tried most of them I am going to let you in on a little secret:

THEY DON’T WORK!

Sure they look cute for the .5 seconds after you have spent all afternoon arranging them just so. The muffin tins to hold and sort beads or legos. Book ledges for toy cars. Chalk labeled toy bins. Color coordinated recycled containers for markers or crayons. I have tried them all and they are all wonderful. But they all have one fatal flaw. Your kids do not care. At. All.

Your kids could care less if you spent months collecting the same size glass jars to paint and color coordinately sort Legos. They will still dump them on the floor for you to step on at 5:00 AM. If by some miracle they do pick them up and put them back in a jar, it sure as hell won’t be sorted by color. That muffin tin of carefully sorted beads? Knocked on the floor by the cat before the kid ever touches them. The DIY lazy susan with two metal cake pans and marbles: taken apart and turned into frisbees by the older kids while the toddler picks the marbles up and stuffs them up his nose.

I have thrown up the white flag of organization. I have fought the good fight and lost. Spectacularly. I no longer care which bin the toys get put in. I just rejoice if they get picked up at all.

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