by Cathy
My kids are on spring break this week. Since we're not traveling anywhere, I decided to take this time to focus on where we live: our house. Although virtually every closet needs to be overhauled and organized, my main focus, with the girls at home this week, was going to be their room, which by the way, is the master bedroom of our two-bedroom condo. They have so much more stuff than Joe and I so it made perfect sense that three years ago, we trade bedrooms and give them the master with the attached bathroom while Joe and I downgraded to the smaller bedroom. The sacrifices we make for our kids, eh?
The only problem with having more space - and I know this would be the case if we move to a bigger house - is that you automatically accumulate more stuff. You say to yourself, 'I'll just keep this. We have the space. I'll just put it right here.' Luckily, we don't have that scenario playing out where we live because we are four people living in a two bedroom, two bath condo with one storage room allotted to us. So whatever doesn't fit in any of those spaces? Gets tossed or donated. We are forced to weed out crap and stuff we no longer have a use for and I'm perfectly okay with that, otherwise, our stuff would swallow us up whole.
As the days approached for Operation Pink Declutter, I was counting the days, the hours, the minutes. I was about to crawl out of my skin with anticipation for the big cleanup every single time I walked into that Disaster of a Master, stepping on paper, markers, erasers, American Girl dolls, clothes, trinkets, purses, princess wands, books, balls, stuffed animals, blankets, rubber bracelets, scarves, chalk, hats, Barbies, Lego pieces, miniscule Lalaloopsy decor that pokes holes in the bottom of your feet... I couldn't take it one minute longer.
Finally, the big day arrived! Actually, we ended up dividing up the room into sections and conquering it as such:
Day 1 - bookshelves and drawer cleanout
Day 2 - under the beds, cabinets and closet floor (containing games, bins and toys)
Day 3 - closet upper shelves and hanging clothes
Day 4 - Toy chest
Yes, it takes FOUR days to clean up the crap in that room. Day one was a battle in itself while I had to ask the hard questions:
"Can you try this on to see if it still fits?"
"Do you still want this?"
"Will you EVER wear this?"
Whereupon I got one of the following responses:
"Uuuhhhhhhgggggg...I'm too tired."
"I don't like that."
"NO! Don't donate that!! I love it!" (item they haven't touched in years)
"That's mine! Not hers! That goes in my drawer!"
"Why are you taking this to storage??"
Operation Pink Declutter is halfway done at this point with barely any help from my kids. I forget that my five-year old's attention span is that of a fruit fly and my ten-year old gets easily distracted when said fruit fly buzzes continuously around her, tempting her, tackling her, tickling her, asking her to come get her out from her pop-up tent trappings - basically anything to get her attention while I'm on my hands and knees mancaving. As you may have guessed, there was A LOT going on.
Once they did what they could to help, I let the girls go off and play and I quietly tackled what remained for the day. (This way, I could throw away what they don't know will ever go missing and get rid of the garbage bag before they find it and start snooping around to see what was tossed. I learned that lesson the hard way.)
When I was clearing out Ari's little preschool pants and tops (the same ones that Bella wore), I suddenly and surprisingly was overcome with emotion. I was saddened at the memories these little clothes brought back for me ('Aw, I have a picture of Bella playing school in this top' or 'Aw, this is what Ari was wearing when she...) And what's more? These clothes will never be worn by my kids EVER. AGAIN. That that phase in their little lives is over. That they are all "growed up," like Ari says. I wept as I lovingly folded these little clothes up and carefully placed them in my "KEEP" pile.
No sooner had I composed myself from that unexpected scenario...it happened again. This time, my husband was laying on one of the girls' beds in the room and we were chatting about various things, when I opened up a purple Dora backpack and found that Ari had stuffed it to the hilt with her plastic Disney tea set, which should be stored in the Mrs. Potts tea container.
"Wow, I never realized how much stuff they had," commented my husband.
"Yeah, and the sad thing will be, that one day, Ari won't ask us to play tea set with her anymore." I don't know where this response came from (well, actually I do, and I surprised even myself by blurting it out) but I could feel my tears working their way back up to my eyes. "She asks us now and we do the best we can but half the time we blow her off because we are too busy doing God knows what while our kids are busy growing up." My eyes starting brimming over at this point. Joe tried to soften this large blow of a realization.
"Yeah, but she still plays with her tea set," he said comfortingly.
"Yeah but one day she won't. One day, she'll stop asking if we want to have a tea party with her because she will outgrow that phase and get bored with it and she'll be too old to want to do that, just like Bella, who never plays tea party with her now."
There was a long pause and all that could be heard was the plastic clanking of the tea set pieces going into Mrs. Potts.
"I know, it's all going so fast," was all he said.
Towards the end of the day and long after I had my mini meltdowns, I was picking up the remains of the cleanup off their floor when Ari, who had earlier found her newly put together tea set, came skipping in, jangling Mrs. Potts about.
"Mommy? Can you play tea party with me?"
As if God had felt my motherly pain from earlier, he sent my little angel in to truly help soften that blow and give me another chance to make things up; those were the best-sounding words I could ever hear right at that moment. "OF COURSE I CAN!!"
"Yay!" she squealed as she was rambling on about how she'll go set it up on the blanket sprawled on the living room floor. I literally dropped everything and followed her, passing our bedroom door where my husband was laying. "See? How ironic," he said half smiling.
"I know, riiiiight?" I yelled back happily as I crossed my legs and sat on the teddy bear blanket. "I still have a lot to do but I'm not doing it. I'm playing tea set with her. That's all I'm going to do now."
"I'll join you," said Joe.
