Mommy Monday: girls' hair elastics organization

Welcome back to Mommy Monday! Today I'm going to show you how I organize all those little hair elastics that I use for my girls' ponytails. But before I show you what I do, I should explain one thing- I am a big believer in giving toddlers as much agency in their own lives as possible. There are so many things in which they do not have a say- when they eat and sleep, when their parents go to work and when they stay home with them, when we run out of milk and now we can't have cereal for breakfast.... you get the idea. When they really start learning to do things for themselves and develop their sense of identity as an individual, it helps a lot to let them make choices for themselves when we can.

So, all that to say, since they were a little under 2 years old I have been asking them to pick what color hair elastic they want that day (when I do put their hair up). I had gotten this set of hair ties before they were even one I think (one of my girls has always had a lot of hair!):



Basically there are 3 sizes, with yellow, pink, blue, purple, green, and red colors in each size. The nice thing about this set is that is lasts a long time. When they were tiny I used the smallest size, and as their hair grew in more I have moved up to the medium ones. So I have at least only ever tried to keep up with one size at a time- the rest I keep in the back of the bathroom cabinet with other extra toiletries. But as you can imagine, these things are pretty small. And they get tangled up with each other pretty easily. Even detail-oriented me got a little crazy trying to pull out the ones I wanted.

Then I was at the dollar store for something else and saw this in the checkout lane:

It's a medicine pill box. Even though it had orange instead of pink I knew it was what I needed! So now I have this:

With the pinks in the red compartment and the reds in the orange one, they look like they are made for each other! This thing has made my life so much easier. And when I switched to the medium size elastics, I stuffed the rest of the tiny ones in the top (in case I ever decide to do some kind of fancy hairdo that would require the use of several smaller ponytails- hey a girl can dream...). Color coded, organized, and simplified: that's the stuff that makes my heart happy! :)