Millennium FalconI never had a toy box as a kid. Don't get me wrong, I had plenty of toys, including tons of games and oodles of puzzles. (Yeah, I was big into puzzles.) But all my Star Wars figures were kept nicely in my Darth Vader helmet case, with all the other bigger vehicles and accessories (like the kick-ass snow-walking tauntaun or lizardy dewback) were piled into a tall cardboard box. Weird how your memory works, right? I actually can envision this stupid cardboard box that was a Diet 7-Up box that a few 2-liter bottles would fit in. I have no clue when or where we got it, but that's what I used to store all my Star Wars goodies.

I was fairly neat though, keeping the boxes for most toys and piling them in shelves in my closet. Though I do recall these two wooden toy chest/cabinets I guess that my dad had built for my sister and I. Not really toyboxes, but that's what we used them for. I'd say they were a few feet wide, about a foot and a half deep and two feet tall. You could sit on the tops of them or lift the top, which were hinged to stay open or closed. So you could fit a lot of toys in there. Or, as we did often, fit a few kids in there to hide. Which, looking back now, probably wasn't the safest thing in the world since there weren't any air holes or spaces. But we had a place hiding in there and I filled that sucker up with X-Wing Fighters, a Millennium Falcon, tons of superheroes (no, they weren't dolls! They were action figures that just happened to look like dolls, thank you very much.), magic tricks, you name it.

Nowadays we have a few toy boxes in our kids' rooms, but we also have umpteen million bins. It's all about bins. Some covered, some open. Some huge, some small. There's the Thomas train bin (as well as the tracks bin, the destinations bin, the take-a-long bin, etc), the Lego bin, the balls bin, the blocks bin, etc. Organized chaos is how I refer to it. But all this toy talk has me thinking of one thing... I want my Millennium Falcon back!

And if you're looking for a good online toy store that sells toys, accessories, clothing and probably a toy box or two, all based and organized by kids' properties like the Wiggles, Thomas, The Backyardigans, etc., check out Tys Toy Box. The site itself is organized in neat, bin-like areas so you can easily find products based on specific characters. And of course, we've got a coupon:

$10 off online orders over $100 at Tys Toy Box
Use discount code ttb607a.
Valid through: December 31, 2007