A week of days without kids sent me to the depths of… the house! (You thought I was going to say despair, didn't you?) But no, as much as I miss them all, this week has been about seizing the opportunity to reduce, reuse, and recycle… or plain old 'clean' the basement. My husband and I were initially going to spend this week away… then decided to say home… and then came up with the crazy idea of cleaning the square footage in our home that holds almost 10 years of accumulated #%*&@!!!Now tackling this isn't as easy as it might sound… I'm a pack rat… inspired by thoughts of reusing things at some time in the future and by sentimental attachments to things that are firsts… first picture, first word, first finger painting, first spelling test, first book, first paper mache face mask, first pencil, first macaroni photo frame… you get the picture. Only this collection of sentimental firsts is multiplied by 3 kids and has gotten completely out of hand.
And the sentimentality includes a lot of things belonging to me as well… like files from my old life as a Landscape Architect, letters from everyone you could imagine including old boyfriends (yikes), decor that went out of style in the 80's, my Barbie and Ken that have joined my 11 year old daughters' Barbies and Kellys in a large plastic container awaiting the day that her daughter might possibly find them fun to play with. And on and on…
It's a mess downstairs, but with my husband's help and patience and strong personality at work, we have made some great headway. And it's actually had moments of fun as we've been alone with our task and had time to reminisce and talk about all sorts of stuff… like how we're going to stop buying so much stuff without carefully considering where it's going to go and where it's going to end up!
We're done for the day, with plans to visit the dump and the local thrift shop tomorrow morning. Doesn't sound romantic, I know, but we are feeling somehow lighter for our hard work, and are going to celebrate by going out tonight to a new restaurant in town.
And just think how excited the kids will be when they get home to find all that open space downstairs!
Feeling cleaner,
Lesley-Anne
Oh that sounds so "cleansing"! Ten years to accumulate stuff can certainly fill the basements!
ReplyDeleteYou reminded me of myself about keeping all the "firsts" our kids have made. I have not been able to part with a single one of Jody's things from school since first grade. And he is 21 yrs old. The rubber maid boxes are making our garage look like a storage unit! Uhggg! Let me know how you chose to let go of things.