The leavins'

Well for our new year we have undertaken the task of decluttering our house. When even our single male friends realize that our house is a babyproofing nightmare - something has to be done! Today our little one is successfully rolling onto his side and soon enough he'll figure out how to get all the way over. So we have thrown out a bunch of stuff (although I am having trouble throwing away some of my college essays). Our biggest problem is books - what if we need them again? So we have moved a lot of them into the garage. In some senses we have spread the clutter out more than removed it - but our house is more babyproof.

The other issue is that after you get all of these things out there are small items that you just don't know what to do with. I have a pretty good memory so I remember that almost all of our 13 blankets come from somebody who was thinking of us. I also was given quite a collection of jewlery boxes and similar items from my former students. Has anyone ever seen me wear jewlery?? They are beautiful but what do you do with them? So if you came to visit right now you would probably wonder if we cleaned at all - but really we have - our closets are more organized!

In the end decluttering is frustrating because I wonder - why do we have all this stuff? Yet at the same time I have trouble getting rid of it. It's very conflicting. You would think this would encourage me not to buy new things - but somehow I still manage to find new things that I want - especially books. So our goal for this weekend is to clean up "the leavins" and make our house presentable for the upcoming super bowl party. We'll see how far we get before it all gets stuffed into the closet without sorting it out.