Clutter and Stuff

Kris and I have spent the past few days decluttering and moving rooms around.  It’s a great feeling to watch our boxes and piles of stuff slowly diminish.  I have a whole pile of stuff to post on FreeCycle or Craig’s List, and a huge bag of clothes to consign or donate.  It feels good mentally too, like the less stuff we have lying around with no real place to go, the less burdened I feel.  We’re discussing getting rid of some of our books (we have 100′s of books, maybe 1000′s), as well as some of our DVD’s (we have 100′s of those too).  What point in keeping them if we’ve only read/watched it once and likely won’t again?

There is still a lot more to go through and organize, but most of it is in boxes now, so should be easy to bring down when I have a spare moment (ha!) and go through them one at a time.  I’d like to tackle the kitchen too.  I’ve started it a little bit.  I bought some cool spice jars from the dollar store and have been playing around with different ways to organize our spices.  But we have lots of kitchen utensils and such that never get used and I’d like to slowly start weeding those out too.  There are also clothes that were packed away while I was pregnant and never got unpacked when we moved, meaning I haven’t worn some of them in over a year.  I’d like to go through those boxes and only keep the clothes I really miss, and sell or give away the rest.

I’m hoping to raise Meredith to not value stuff as much as most people these days do.  I would love it if Meredith looked forward to birthdays and Christmas because of the celebrations and traditions surrounding them, rather than the mountain of presents she might get.  I think that cosleeping and not letting her cry it out (and therefore potentially turn to toys and blankies for comfort instead) is a good step in that direction, but I feel that not being surrounded by all sorts of stuff we barely use or don’t look at is important too.

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