Cluttered

I have been feeling overwhelmed by the clutter in my house. It is a constant battle. The basement is a disaster. I have been reading this book on cleaning up clutter...written by one of the guys on Clean Sweep on TLC. I read it right before bed and it affected my dreams. All night long, I cleaned and organized my basement. Not the best way to spend my sleep time.

It is really interesting though. The book has some of the reasons we keep things around and some of them really resonate with me.

First, "I might need it some day." I come by this one honestly. My dad always keeps stuff he might need on hand. Like if I went to him and said, "Do you have some cardboard, baling twine, and fertilizer?" he would have everything I needed to make some MacGuyveresque contraption. So, I keep boxes on hand (so if I have to ship something at Xmas, I will have a box), but then I realized one day that I had WAY too many boxes. Or if one of the kids' coloring books comes with crayons, I add those crayons to our already large stockpile of crayons. Because you can never have too many crayons? And being unprepared is one of my worst nightmares.

Also, "But it is worth a lot of money." This is another big one for me. We keep things around because we paid money for them and it seems a shame to waste that money. This applies to so many things in our basement. But mainly, childrens' clothes... Sitting on a goldmine of childrens' clothes. Good stuff, too. It is so hard for me to think about just throwing away piles of money. But things are only worth what people want to give you for them. I have tried a couple of things with the clothes. Consignment shops, but oh man do they make me mad. Another rant for another day. Ebay...I ended up paying more for the shipping than I made on the sale. I have given them to friends.

Then there is the emotional attachment to things. This is probably my biggest crutch...for the things that may seem the most worthless. I read tons of journal-based novels as a young girl, and fancied that someone would someday want to publish my journals. So I wrote journals after journals for years. I kept boxes of notes passed during middle school. The further the distance from that time period, the more obvious it is that rollerblade box in my closet is full of paper...not memories. There was a time when I thought those were the best days of my life and I wanted to hold on to them forever. And they were fun times...and maybe I am afraid that if I throw that box away those funny times that made me laugh until I cried will just cease to exist. Already, Aimee or Jamie (my BFFs from grade/middle/high school) will remind me of something and I won't have any recollection of that moment. And how could that happen to me?! I have the best memory... And all those ratty pieces of paper that are folded into special shapes are my back up hard drive of those days. But who I am kidding?! No one will ever even consider my box full of paper as memories when I die. Delilah and Evan will open it up and see piles of paper so old the pencil and pen writing can't even be read on it and see it for what it is...trash. And quite honestly, I would die if they ever read my journals...so it would be good if I was already dead...because that would be awful. (note to self: research ways to shred entire journals.)

These are the things swirling through my head last night as I tried to sleep. I want a way to clean up some of that clutter for we have space for this life. I am also wanting to help Evan to learn some good habits when it comes to limiting yourself and getting rid of things we don't need. We haven't done a good job so far... you can tell by the bins overflowing with trains ("But they are worth a lot of money!") and books. And I have hard time making him get rid of something that he used to love so much....but maybe we can learn together.