Stuff

We have Too.  Much.  Stuff.  Waaaayyyyyy too much.  And no matter how much I try to control the vast amounts of stuff that lives in this house.....it multiplies.  Seriously, every night it grows.   Laundry, toys, books, craft supplies, hunting & fishing paraphernalia it can get crazy.  The kitchen island bar is the dumping ground for mail, craft projects, "treasures" as it's right inside the front door.  I am in constant purge mode.  Clothes, books & toys that are out grown get passed down, sold or donated.  I try to keep my closets purged of barely worn or wrong size clothes.  The girls color dozens of color pages a day.  I supposed I am a bad mom that I don't save every "masterpiece", but there are some special ones that do get tucked away. Otherwise when they aren't lookin'....in the trash they go!! I can only imagine the influx once the twins start pre-K in a few weeks.  Bill's hunting & fishing room....well, that doesn't get touched and thank goodness it's locked up and I don't have to see it, or it would drive me bonkers!  The garage.....oh my.......the horrible garage that we seem to clean every 3 months, add more racks & storage and vow to keep maintained.....and tools get dumped back without being put away, Bill's literature and sample totes get discarded when it's time for him to clean out his car, sidewalk chalk, bikes, & bubbles pile up.  This DOES drive me bonkers when I try to pull the truck into the garage and run into half the STUFF that is there.  Then we have to spend hours on a nice weekend afternoon trying to clean it back out again.   Thank goodness the girls have a designated toy room in the basement....so when the end of the day comes and I just don't feel like making sure it's all picked up....the stuff stays where it is until the next day.  At least if it's in the basement, I don't have to look at it.

Here is a picture of the toyroom taken recently.  That thing can go from clean to destroyed in 60 seconds flat.  The toyroom is adjacent to my home office.  There is a bathroom and family room off of this room as well.  So when I need to work at home for a bit, the girls are perfectly content to play away.  I am trying to work at being more diligent at having them help pick stuff up.  And they do good work and know where STUFF goes when it's time to get down to business.  But usually it ends up an unbalanced work load and one of the girls picks up more while the other 2 wander off and get distracted by a book or a game. 

And I sit here in the office blogging while the girls are in the room playing right now.  However I look around this office and Bill's "amazing" filing system of piles of papers and samples thrown all over the floor and it's no wonder they feel it's acceptable to leave stuff lying around.   I used to be a "save-every-scrap-of-paper-that -meant-anything or save-every-gift-ever-given" person.  Not any more.  Purge, discard, donate....whatever it takes to get this place manageable.   I have probably spent hundreds of dollars in the past year buying more shelves, storage bins & units just to house this stuff.  Bill said I'd have saved a lot of money if we just had less stuff.  Yup!

I am encouraging the girls to start making decisions of their own on things it's time to pass down.  They love to give things to their cousin "Baby Kate" or a friend's daughter "Baby Jasmyn."  Every time I get rid of something as long as I tell them it went to one of those two, they are really fine with that!!   So today I have plans to toss out that Hungry Hippos game that is missing like 1/2 of the white marbles and that puzzle that was given to us that is missing a piece right from the center.  Seriously, they've got enough other stuff, what's a few games? 

I recently repinned an item on Pintrest (seriously addicted to Pintrest) about having your kids collect unused/needed toys, books, games & clothes around the holiday and on Christmas Eve they should be placed in a large bag and left under the tree for Santa to collect and pass onto other kids that aren't as fortunate as we are.  What a great idea!  I wonder if I could come up with a holiday every month that required someone to stop by and pick up bags of unused items?  In addition to getting rid of some of this stuff, I hope its a good tool to help the girls learn to think of others and to begin to ascertain the difference of what is really meaningful to them and what is just stuff. 

So the twins birthday is just 2 weeks away.  They also start school the same week.  I can only imagine all of the new stuff that will work its way into our house that week.  If anyone is short on "stuff", I'd be happy to pass it along.  Otherwise I'll just keep plugging away here.....