Get It Out of Here!

We took a lovely vacation camping this past week, first just our family, then meeting up with our local church singles branch that Jamie is involved with. It was a wonderful few days, but something struck me on the way home. There was never any complaining from my kids about being bored, yet there were no toys there, no television, no video games. They spent their time playing games together, heading outside to look for interesting things, going on hikes, etc.

More inspiration to get tossing!

I ravaged the girls' room for the most part of yesterday. Since they don't want to take care of the things in their room, I decided that anything I wasn't willing to take care of could go. That ended up being one kitchen garbage bag full for the trash, and a big black garbage sack mostly full for the DI. As many times as I've done this you would think they would have nothing left in their room, but they still do. A LOT less, though. And I'm not even done yet. I still need to hit their clothes hard, because that seems to end up being a big portion of their mess. I've also told them that I'm liable to get sick of more stuff if I have to keep taking care of their things for them.

Before I started tossing Carolyn told me I couldn't get rid of any of her friends like her hippo and her pig and I told her of course I wouldn't. After I took the bags out she checked again about those, then asked me if I had taken her monkeys or her purse. I told her those were safe too. See, she really doesn't need much.

I'm not as extreme as Lara yet (a worthwhile read, I would love to hear your opinion), but I'm far closer to that than how I used to be.

The Shakespearean "rub" in this case is that it's far easier to do this with the kids' stuff than it is mine. I'm leaps and bounds better in that too, and I still blame time as a huge factor, but I NEVER get in my bedroom to do some real tossing. I also blame the fact that any time I go in there little people follow and I don't like everyone following me in there, and by the time they are in bed I don't want to think about cleaning in there.

Do you ever find yourself giving your children advice that you should be following as well? Like this morning, I walked into their beautiful bedroom to put some laundry away. Melanie was all spread out, lying on the floor coloring. Direct quote out of my mouth (after I said it I wrote it down): "Isn't it nice when your room is clean, and you have a nice place where you can go and hang out and just BE?" I need to talk to myself more often.

P.S. I have some really fun pictures from our trip that maybe someday I'll post, but when I'm in a cleaning frenzy I have to run with it seeing as how it doesn't happen all that often.