Discovering Minimalism
Discovering Minimalism
Do you feel like all you ever do is clean up after your kids? As soon as you get the kitchen cleaned up, you turn around and realize that the living room has had tiny tornadoes whipping through it? I felt like I was cleaning up my kid’s childhoods and not participating in them. I wasn’t making memories with them. It seems I was always behind the memory camera, never in the picture. One day it occurred to me, my oldest is old enough to pick up after herself. Why am I doing it? It also came with the reality that 1. She doesn’t know how because I never showed her and 2. If she has so many toys she cannot do it herself, we need to get rid of some. So, I did what any crazy, desperate Mom would do…
The Great Toy Purge
The Great Toy Purge
I enlisted their help and collected every single toy in our house and dumped them all in the middle of the floor. I figured it would be easier to do if they were all together. The “rip the Band-aid off” mentality. We sorted for about two hours (but felt like 20). I will give my tiny humans some credit, they hung in there for a while. Finally, my daughter said, “Mom, can you finish this? I’m so tired and I really don’t care what we keep. Just keep my unicorns, okay?” So the two of them disappeared like thieves in the night. I can no longer remember how many toys we donated that day, but this is what was left.
All that Remained
The Big Reveal
I put the toys back in their rooms and I was so scared at what the reaction would be. I just knew I had gone off the deep end. My son never checked up. He is like that though. People keep saying he is “spirited”. Ha! My daughter, well, she is attached to EVERYTHING. Every scrap of paper, every googly eye that falls off, every leaf, and rock…everything. She walked in her room and quietly surveyed the damage. I just knew the tears were coming. She turned around with the biggest grin on her face. She jumped up and down (literally) and thanked me over and over. Mind-Blown! This was February 2016.
Then What?
Over the coming year, I noticed that my babies would disappear and play together for long periods of time. Before, they would only last a few minutes before they wanted to watch TV or needed adult supervision of some sort. They seemed happier and so was I. I wasn’t picking up as much. Hmmm…
Just after Christmas of 2016, I found myself on Pinterest looking at ways to do more with less. We had moved from a much larger house with not one, but two outside storage areas (that were full I might add) to a smaller house with zero outside storage. The need to get rid of things was overwhelming and suffocating. We were drowning in our possessions. Moving one thing to get to the next, just to move it again. I found this article about “minimalism” and thought, “Wait, what? This is a thing?” As intriguing as the idea was, I didn’t want an empty house with white walls and an echo. Then I found another article, and another, a blog, and several weeks worth of information gathering later, what did I have to lose? Stuff. Just stuff. That’s all I had to lose.
Disclaimer: I apologize for the terrible pics. I had no idea at the time that I would want to share this journey 🙂
