New Year's Clean up

Have you ever seen The Simpsons episode where Marge is secretly giving a load of things to the Goodwill truck while Homer, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie watch television? She tries to be discreet and quietly carries the stuff out the front door. For whatever reason, the rest of the family notices Marge is acting strangely and runs outside to find out what's going on. Seeing the truck they begin running after it as Marge yells to the two men picking the things up to hurry up and get out of there. The family's sheer desire to keep these possessions that they haven't used or even thought of for years is enough for them to catch up to the truck and grab a portion of the donated items.

This is what is going on at my house. We have a basement of accumulated toys, clothing, household items, etc. that we do not use nor need, but I know that there has to be someone out there who could use them. So I have filled our dining room with boxes and bags that will be dropped off tomorrow morning and hopefully put to good use.

I tried to do this whole process of purging without the boys (and that includes Kevin) figuring out what I was doing. However, when they came upstairs to find piles of...things...they became curious. What is this, Mom? Oh we're going to donate it. What does that mean? After a quick explanation by me, they then began to explain to me how they love this particular item. Yeah right. So I said that they could have that toy, but then I was going to go downstairs and pick out something else in exchange.

You can only imagine how this process went. I'm going to let them play with this stuff until Kevin comes home and then when they're not looking I'll run outside and fill the back of his vehicle with everything to take out tomorrow.

I am a self-proclaimed pack rat, but Kevin may be worse. Luckily, the desire to start and someday finish the basement is so great that he is getting better at parting with things. His collection of flannels from the '90s falls in to the category. Not all of them were sent packing. I let him keep a couple to reminisce his lost youth ;)

So the main goal is to clear out enough of the basement to start framing it out, put up walls, and one day have a family room in our basement. That "one day" will be before the baby gets here. In June. (Don't laugh.)