BookWenches

By Clea

Now that summer has officially started, it is now beginning to feel a lot like spring here in the great Pacific Northwest. Along with the new semi- sunny warm weather, my family is experiencing a great deal of change. My husband is going back to school to embark on a new career, my oldest daughter has graduated from elementary school and will be having new adventures in middle school, my toddler is about to become a preschooler and fighting potty training and I am shedding some very unwanted pounds. With all these changes we have decided to start purging some things from our lives, to do a little spring cleaning to go along with the spring type weather. It started with the weeds in our front yard and has moved to the items inside our house.

For the last six months, my husband has been harassing our oldest child to get rid of the gargantuan amounts of toys in her very small room. For the first eight years of her life, we thought she was going to be an only child, and we, along with my parents, spoiled the crap out of her. She had her bedroom, a play room and half of the family room full of toys. Over the years, we have gone through and packed up those toys that she has outgrown and stored them in the garage in the hopes of passing them down to another sibling. Now our garage is so full of packed up toys and clothes that we aren’t able to park our cars in there. Over the last couple of years, all that stuff in the garage has begun to feel overwhelming to me.

I was so excited when we had our second child because it meant that we could finally use all that stuff and then get rid of it once she outgrew it. Woohooo! That time has finally come. We have passed along or donated tons of baby clothes and toys, and this week we will be doing the same with the toddler toys and clothes. Now we just have to deal with the never ending flow of toys from our middle schooler’s room. Until this week, she had been refusing to get rid of anything, claiming that she still played with all of it (as witnessed by the thickening layers of dust on all her stuffed animals), but after her graduation ceremony from elementary school, she shocked us all and said it was time to pass it all down to her little sister. Her room is now bare and her closet practically empty, as she went through it all and realized that she has outgrown all of it.

I decided to take her cue and went through my own closet. I have lost 30 pounds in the last few months, and I don’t ever intend to go back to what I weighed before. I got rid of half my closet of clothes that I too have grown out of. Then I went through my drawers and tossed all my old, torn and stretched out unmentionables. I told my husband that his closet is next. He hasn’t worn more than half his stuff in over three years, so I think it is safe to say that he won’t be wearing it this year either.

I went through all of the clothes and toys and saved stuff that I think our younger daughter can benefit from the most. Christmas dresses and fancy shoes that won’t go out of style, Barbie dolls and ponies that she will cherish as she gets older and other things that I think she will make good use of have been packed up and placed in the garage. The rest of it, which is way more than what we are saving, is going to be donated to a local thrift store. I like giving our goods to them, because they give you discounts on items that you can purchase from them. I intend to take that discount and buy some summer clothes for the girls so we can save most of our money for new school clothes in the fall.

This whole process has been very cathartic for me. I am beginning to lose that feeling that our belongings own us. Plus my house is tidier, which is great because I am a massive neat freak who has been feeling like I have lost control of my surroundings over the last three years or so. I feel like I am finding myself again. I like that.