Well, we are slowly but surely packing and purging. I love my husband for getting on board and helping me along with my goal to slim things down around here! He has taken the laundry room on as his personal project. Funny, it was exactly a year ago that I went through the laundry room and did a massive clean up myself. We have such a large, long laundry room that it collects anything and everything! He's already thrown out two big bags of trash.
I started in on the kitchen and have already weeded out a box of old appliances/pots and pans that I no longer use. That was just from one corner cabinet (two shelves and a lazy susan). I still have plenty of spaces to go. It's funny how much we keep around, even though we don't use it.
I'm having trouble convincing my kids that some things just aren't important enough to keep around. For example...Valentine's Day is just around the corner. We still have some valentines floating around out there from last year because my kids have trouble getting rid of anything that's been given to them as a "gift." Just yesterday my 9 year old daughter informed me that she was going to keep the empty heart box that held the chocolates her Nana brought to her because it's "pretty." Anyone have suggestions as to how to get them to throw stuff away without hurting their feelings and seeming harsh?
I've lost track of what number bag we're on at this point...I know it's more than 9. Still more to come though...we've been here six and a half years now. This clean up was long over-due!
3 comments:
Suggestion - buy a cheap digital camera for the kids to take photos of their "treasures". Upload to your computer and when they hit 100 photos or so, they upload to Walmart and make a cheap scrapbook (under $10). In a way, it creates more "stuff" but you can fit a lot of photos on each page and maximize your dollars. And an 8x8" scrapbook takes up a lot less space than old Valentine's candy boxes. LOL
I will confess...pls don't tell my kids..that when they are away from the house that I would go into their rooms and do some 'purging'...not outright obvious so that they'd notice half their room gone when they returned! but some things and when I didn't make a big deal out of them getting rid of some stuff they really didn't notice the stuff gone....I will also admit that I'd pick the days when their rooms looked like a cyclone went thru it! The they really didn't notice!
Love Cheryl's suggestions. I am working on doing something like that right now actually with their crafts.
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