'Small Homes Grow Tight Families'..... they also leave little to no room for hoarding crap.

Since it's so cold, wet, foggy and miserable outside, I have spent a little more time inside trying get some things organized. It's really not going so well. You know how you can never organize anything without making a bigger mess first. That bigger mess is where I'm at and seem to be stuck at. It probably doesn't help that I waste plenty of time looking through the pictures and reading old notes and stories. By the time I have pulled it all out and read and looked it's just time to cram it all back away again to get it out of the way.

 I wish I could just simply bag it all up and toss it. It would be so nice to live with only the basics, a few simple toys for the kids, a few simple decorations and furnishings for the house, seven simple outfits for each day of the week for each of us, one coat, one pair of gloves, just a few pairs of shoes.... like we were living on a vacation...no closets full of things we-don't-use-but-might-someday. No stacks of papers crammed here and there. I have thought about this way too much. The idea is nice but I know I could never pull all of that off.  But I'm sure going to try. For starters my paper mess... I am diving into it all, even the pictures from the kids, those are one of my hoarding weak spots. I'm having Jeremy bring home a cool scanner from work so I can mass scan it all and reclaim me some much needed space and sanity.

During one of my attempts to sort through my mess I found this little gem I had jotted down from sometime last summer:
       We were all loaded in the car heading out to drop the kids off at Grandma's house so Jeremy and I could go out on a date. Ava grabbed a baggie of pumped breast milk out of Ruthy's diaper bag and put it on her forehead to cool herself down because it was a hot day- then explains to me that she can't buckle up because it's too hard- she asks "can I just take a chance?" Me- "no, you can't take a chance." Luke- "Ava if we get a ticket they're mostly a hundred dollars!" I would scare Luke and Ava into buckling by telling them that the police would pull us over if they saw them not buckled.

Okay enough reading and typing, time to get scanning and tossing. And it doesn't hurt to flip on an episode of Hoarders while I work to make myself feel better.