Apr 12, 2017

Our landlord wants to start showing our townhouse to new renters starting this weekend, so we’ve been busy working to clean and tidy and put a bunch of stuff away to make it look nicer. Mostly I don’t mind because it’s all stuff we’re going to have to do eventually anyway and it’s a good motivation to get started on some packing and sorting. 

Today alone I tidied up the kids’ rooms and stashed away anything that didn’t look nice, which for a certain seven year old’s room meant that the majority of the things got hidden away. Hallelujah. As a mom with a heart I can totally understand that it’s important for her to have a space to tape pictures to her wall and play with dolls and make random little things (that last one was the epitome of me in my childhood), but as a tidy person who hates clutter I am so so happy to have an excuse to get all the junk out of sight. Felix’s room would probably be worse if we let him have anything in there besides his bed, a bin of stuffed animals, and a small chair, but we don’t, so it stays pretty clean. Though I did put the random small chair down in the basement with the rest of the things we’re trying to hide.

Anyway I was going impress you with all the stuff I did. Aside from the kids’ rooms I also sorted allllll the toys in the living room and put the majority of the big toys down in the basement, cleaned off the kitchen counters and put most of the stuff we usually have out away or packed it up, and I forget what else and this is a boring list, but I did a bunch of other stuff and the house is already looking a lot nicer and more clean and it came at the expense of me walking my pregnant self up and down the stairs one billion times today, so just be impressed.

As inevitably happens, the thought came to me in the midst of all this cleaning and de-junking that “we should live like this all the time!” Which if you know me at all is nothing new–I always want to have a lot less stuff cluttering up the house and I’ve had enough yard sales to prove it–but the truth is it’s just tricky when you have kids and want to keep various toys and things around for the different stages they’re in. Plus with a floor plan as weird as what we have right now sometimes it just makes more sense to have certain things in the main living areas rather than having to trek up or downstairs for them all the time, but then it leads to awkward furniture arrangements and other visually unappealing conglomerations. So as much as I’d love to just genuinely have less stuff, the main thought that occurred to me as I was putting some of the toys and other things away is that we don’t have to have it all out all the time.

Ok maybe not the most profound. I mean we’ve done this before, where we cycle through toys and stuff, and it’s nice, but can also be a pain in its own right. But I think there’s a lot to be said for not having all the things crammed in one room and having to look at them all crammed there day after day. Typically my knee-jerk reaction is, if we have too much stuff, get rid of it! But I think for the current phase of our lives we’re in right now maybe what we need to be doing more of is just putting away the things we’re ready to take a break from. We’ll have a decent storage area in the new house, so I think it’ll be a good chance to give it a try. Plus we’ll also have a yard AND patio AND two car garage for the first time ever in our marriage, which means that some of the big toys (like our toddler size basketball hoop) that really belong outside anyway could actually get stored outside or in the garage or something–yay.

Anyway, I guess my point is mostly that you should be impressed at how productive I was today. And also that it’s ok to go through phases and recognize which stuff is worth having out all the time and which stuff it might be time to get rid of or just take a break from for a while. I’m too tired to make any more sense than that, sooooo the end.