Decluttering

Today seemed like a blur of a lot of stuff done, yet at the same time nothing done. How is that possible? I began the morning in my garage at 8am, after dropping the kids off at school. Our garage is double deep, double wide, big enough for 4 regular sized vehicles. You'd think that would be plenty roomy for us, yet both of our vehicles remain subjected to the outside cold and snow, and have not seen the inside of the garage in over a year.

A few times each year, I spend hours cleaning it, decluttering, and organizing...only to have it immediately filled up again before I can even get my truck inside. It is though the empty space seems to call out to the rest of the family "Fill me up with more stuff!", and Presto! New stuff magically appears.

This winter season, it has been the uncountable boxes from the new Christmas lights. The light show was great, and I really don't mind parking outside. But I have already broken down a garage full of boxes twice earlier this season, and I just really do not feel like doing it again. But time presses on, and the pile is getting bigger (I did not think that to be possible), and there are things I do need from my garage. To find my ice skates yesterday, I had to climb over the perilously stacked mountains of cardboard....and then back again. So today was the day.

I began breaking down boxes, and soon realized that within each box were another 2-4 smaller boxes! Good grief! This seemingly insurmountable task as it was, was now at least three times larger!!! With my baby crying, Laura in tears(I still don't know why...she is too stubborn to tell me), and having no fun at all, I was able to get perhaps half of the task out to the curb. That was 3 cardboard piles about 3 feet by 3 feet stacked each. Our recycle guy is not going to like us today!

I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for the Cookie Meeting tonight. I could never be a teacher. This lesson planning stuff is too much pressure for a perfectionist! I was worried that I had planned too many activities to fit into 90 minutes. It actually turned out wonderfully....I kept the girls on task, engaged by the many different things we did, and well behaved! We accomplished everything on my list, had snack, and I held the following parents meeting on time! This was quite impressive...especially since I neither had a watch nor clock in the room. Yay! Go me!

Bob took Michael and the neighbor boys to their late night hockey practice. They will be gone til about 11pm, so I am taking this opportunity to finally get the tree and Christmas decorations down while Tubby is happily playing on the floor. He just woke up from a nice nap he took while I was at the meeting, so hopefully I will have time to make some good progress. Oh! And I also put out another two boxes of clothes for donation pick up tomorrow. It feels so good to declutter!