Thank you, Target, for solving one of my more annoying organizing issues. I could not figure out what to do with the boys’ stuffed animals. It’s not like they have an outrageous number of them, but I could never figure out where to put them. They usually ended up on their bed, where I would carefully (why do I bother to do anything carefully?) arrange them, and they would all give up the ship and leap into the crack between the bed and the wall. I’d usually leave them there because, frankly, at least they were neatly shoved in the crack and weren’t making a giant mess in the center of the room like everything else does. But the boys do play with their animals a lot, and would often want one particular animal that was shoved way down deep on sedimentary layer #1. And really it wasn’t much of a system. I Googled for “stuffed animal storage systems” and didn’t really see anything that would work. It was a lot of nets that hung from the ceiling and would hold five bears, or giant bins (or huge-ass frog furniture things) (on second look I see that it’s not a frog but just a big green fuzzy thing, the giant bin is a frog, however) that would take up lots of floor space and which Henry and Eli would surely dump out (they’re big on dumping) and never, ever put away.

And then! Behold! Target! While wandering through the store yesterday with my usual random and disparate list, I came upon this rocket ship stuffed animal holder (I can’t find it on the website, you’ll just have to go to the store yourself if you want one – it was with the stuffed animals in the toy section). It had everything I wanted: hangs on the wall so it doesn’t take up floor space, is not dumpable, is cute (it kind of looks like something Haba would make and sell for $50), and the boys actually like putting their stuffed animals in it, because they can pretend they’re all on the way to the moon. And it only cost $9.99 (I had actually looked around our house for a solution because I’m trying not to buy things like this, but it was totally $9.99 well spent; I never would have been able to assemble anything that worked as well from our house castoffs).

On another Target note, while we were there, Zuzu started to cry and I wanted to nurse her. It suddenly occurred to me that there is absolutely no place to sit down in Target (except I guess for the dressing room?). I finally found a place in a display of a fake nursery. We climbed up on the little pedestal and I nursed her in the display glider. It’s nice they had it on display because it really wasn’t very comfortable and it would be good to know that before buying (though I suppose it would have been more comfortable if someone had finished assembling it – it was missing an arm, which was lying on the floor next to it). No one seemed to care that I was putting myself on display while breastfeeding, but then at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday every other single person in Target is a mother with a 2-year-old and an infant, so they were probably just annoyed that I situated myself in the pretend nursery before they did.