This weekend, we moved our two oldest boys downstairs so our fourth could have his own room and cry it out. We got tired of him waking up in our bedroom, seeing us, and crying for me (he's not yet weaned... help me!). With the move, came the opportunity to downsize our toy collection dramatically. At first, I thought I could get rid of one entire toy storage unit, but instead (and after much pushback from my kids and even my husband who said I might be going too far with minimizing...) I decided to limit it to whatever they could fit into our two storage units. With shelves and tons of fabric containers, we actually had a lot more storage than our Ikea Kallax (4x2) shelving unit and the Trofast that looks like a step L. I digress.... You would NOT BELIEVE how many toys we have four years living in Salt Lake near a ton of family. Trust me when I say I was one of those moms who only had one box of toys for my child for the first two years of his life. We were in Spokane, not near family, and it was easy living in a small rented space, to limit the toys and enjoy the few we did have. Or so I thought.
Fast forward to moving to Salt Lake where we were near family. With generous family living nearby, our kids toy collection quickly grew. You know how they say growth can be organic? Our organic growth SKY ROCKETED, and with our family growing from one to four children, there was even more reason for everyone wanting to give us more.
This experience has taught me that despite being an organized person, masked under those OCD neat freak tendencies is actually just a basic hoarder. Because instead of donating stuff on a regular basis, I thought my "boxes inside of boxes" and "organized self" was doing fine, when in reality, I was just accumulating more storage units. Cute baskets, wire baskets, white baskets, pink baskets, purple baskets.... clear containers, translucent containers, fabric containers, clear boxes, pull drawers, pails, ... I can't believe how long I could go on for! Basically anything to help my organized hoarding continue to hoard on. And that's kind of what happened to our toy collection. They found new homes, organized homes, and .....
I guess along the way, without life changes forcing you to declutter (going away to college, moving out of my parents' house, getting married, moving to another state for new job opportunities with said husband, etc.) it's easy to just keep everything. For me, I'm also very sentimental. I still have old movie ticket stubs that I had to finally throw away when the writing rubbed off and it was hard to see what movie and dates were even on there. I was really sad when I noticed this. And my parents weren't any better, I just finally threw away a bundle of hair wrapped in tissue paper with Chinese characters describing it as the first hair my parents ever cut off of my head as a baby. I am 35 years old. They gave this to me when I was about 22. I have kept it until now! Why?! I dunno, I guess if my parents kept it for that long, it must have been special, so I just continued the tradition.... so when I look at toys and think about how every single one of my children have played with this, or that they got this for this birthday or that Christmas (yeah, I have a weird memory that's only applicable for useless information like this), I hesitate and then.. I just put it off and here I am.... with tons of toys!
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that this experience so far, of decluttering and organizing my home, has basically taught me that I was a hoarder disguised as an organized person. An organized hoarder.
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