I first started implementing blanket time when Hunter was about 1 1/2 years old or so, slacked off a little while, and then put it back into practice when Nathanael was about 16 months or so. You can read about Nathanael's first week and about how to train your child for blanket time here.
I really believe it's a good thing to train a child to sit still for long periods of time and teach them to concentrate on ONE thing in this world where information and tasks seem to be exchanged and occur at a million miles a minute. And with all the busyness and movement and obnoxiousness of the media that our children are exposed to, I really think we need to be intentional at combating it with these types of exercises. I pray that these daily practices of self-control will help my children not fall prey to ADD and ADHD behavior issues....we shall see.
As for my system...I have gone through stages where I let them pick the toys, then I pick for them, then sometimes I've modified and give them more toys than I should, and then I scale back and only give them a few. After all of that I really, really believe that LESS is more and picking for them (while trying to keep the toys varied and not show up too often) is the way to go.
Children these days have too many choices. It's overwhelming to them! I love that I'm training my boys from an early age to be content with what's been given to them and to cling to that age-old, teacher saying, "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit."
I guess I might be revealing a little too much about my psychotic need to be organized and always know what's coming next, but I even went as far as to create a google doc for myself that outlines our blanket time toys and how each of them are rotated throughout the month. I confess that I have yet to finish this document as I have had about a billion other docs I've started with my heart-felt attempts to be a purposeful and successful homemaker in a newly remodeled trailer, but I'll be finishing it soon and adding my new charges to the mix as I train every preschooler that enters my doors how to do blanket time. 
A WONDERFUL new things has happened to our afternoon blanket times too!! Now that we're in our new home complete with a beautiful front yard that stays mowed and clean and fresh without us lifting a finger we have blanket times outside a lot of the time! Woo hoo!!
Don't mean to be making you poor northern folk jealous, but the weather here in sunny Florida has been absolutely DIVINE and begs to be basked in and enjoyed! Blanket times in general are are a very good thing!
But outside blanket times are even better!Oh yeah! And one more thing: make sure you are giving your child an age appropriate toy that they can figure out/play with/do BY THEMSELVES without any help from you or whining about it. Whining on blanket time is NOT allowed. For instance, we got a Mega Blocks Thomas the Train set for Christmas from a family member. I thought it would make an awesome blanket time toy, but the thing falls apart if you blink at it wrong and takes a lot of patience on my part to set it up. It's fun for Nathanael as long as I'm right there to make it work right, but imagine his frustration if I were to set it in front of him to play with by himself for 30 minutes. Not cool. This was not an appropriate blanket time toy. My rule is: if it makes them whine, I take it out of blanket time rotation and find some one-on-one time to play with them and teach them how to play with it. If the toy does not work well while I'm with them or they just can't get it, it goes into the toy closet until they've grown a little more and gotten better with their fine motor skills.
You see the picture of Hunter above with the dinosaurs and that stand that he has them all on? I used to let him play with his dinosaurs alone because he didn't know how to put that stand together without my help. But, in the past several weeks he's showed me that he's figured out how to put it together all by himself. So, now it's part of his blanket time toys. But I would never in a million years let Nathanael near it by himself! :)
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