at 9:15 p.m., both of my children were fast asleep. i had fallen asleep in M's room, so i came out ready to jump into bed and read my book, then go to sleep early. however, that changed when i went to get a drink of water and ended up emptying and cleaning out all of the cabinets in the kitchen! yes, that's right- two huge trash bags FULL of sh!t gone!
let me backtrack for a second- for the last couple weeks, i have been on an insane mission to cleanse this house of clutter (ignore last night's nightstand post...) i'm talking like 9-month-pregnant-nesting insane! and no, i am not pregnant! but i am sick and tired of not knowing where things are, or of tripping over things because they don't have a home, or of the mad rush to "tidy" up every time someone comes over, when there is no way to "tidy" up when there is nowhere to put anything!
so, i have been sorting and cleaning and stacking and grouping and piling. i have a bunch of stuff that i can put in storage, a bunch of stuff to sell at our big yard sale coming up, and even more trash! it's been kind of fun and not so bad.
The hardest time i am having is with the toys. my daughter plays with EVERYTHING! i mean, seriously, everything! two days ago, i had a santa claus cookie cutter that i was going to add to the sell pile, but my memory flashed to her playing with it, so i put it in her play kitchen in her room instead. when she found it, it sounded like she had won the lottery. my husband says that she has too many toys and doesn't play with any of them. well, of course she doesn't play with any of them when he's around... she's playing with him! but when she's here with me all day, every day, the joy of my presence wears off, and she plays with all of those thousands of toys that we have in every corner of this house. honestly, it wouldn't be so bad if her toys didn't consist of 7 million pieces. or if she didn't remember each and every piece to everything. so, i'm working on the toys. it's hard, but i'm taking baby steps. i know one thing for sure- i'm selling the moon dough kit, because moon dough is never allowed in our house again. that was easy!
even easier was the kitchen! mismatched tupperware and plastic forks with missing tines- gone! the snack cabinet was easy, too- if we hadn't eaten it in the last two weeks, it got tossed. i thought the spice cabinet was going to be hard. i love to cook, and i love to experiment with the bottles that i find in there. how on earth was i going to pare it down?!? it turns out, it was not hard at all. in fact, i just finished it in about five minutes, right before i came in here. as i was looking closely at each bottle, taking a mental inventory of what i use/don't use, i found a very useful bit of information- an expiration date. i had no idea there were expiration dates on spices. clearly. so, i very quickly, and easily went from about 40 bottles to 10 in that very short period of time. at least now i know. and no one has ever gotten sick, so it's all good. most were only expired by a few months, some by a year. one went way back to 2007. oops! if only everything else in this house would have a clearly labeled "throw me out" on it. life and this task would be so much easier!
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