the gift of time

My wonderful friend P contacted me a few days ago and asked if it would be OK if she brought her son over on Wednesdays for a playdate with the boys while she took a pottery class with her daughter. She offered to bring along the babysitter/mother's helper that we share as well, since Wednesdays is our regular day for K to come watch the kids while I work in the afternoon. This resulted in overwhelming joy for my kids (playing a game of Balloon Lagoon with K and E in this photo), and an extra 2 hours of free time for me. I suppose I could fill that time with another lesson or two. But somehow that would seem like a waste of this wonderful gift of ME time!

And what did I do with my gifted time today, you wonder? (I'll bet you can guess!) Yup! I purged!

And speaking of which, I promised you all an update as I went along, so here's what I worked on yesterday:

Remember my closet from my last post?:

Well, now it looks like this:
Stunning difference, no? By the time I went to bed yesterday, I had stuffed 7 tall kitchen trash bags full of clothes to be donated, another 2 trash bags full of recycling, 1 of trash, and 3 boxes of kids clothes to be sold.

This afternoon I dove head-first into the room behind the garage. I didn't take any photos yet, because (alarmingly enough) I'm not sure you'd be able to tell any difference yet. But my tally from my 2 hours of hard labor and sorting through 5 or 6 large boxes of junk was: 2 large garbage bags full of garbage, another bag half-filled with paper recycling, a mammoth mountain of corrugated cardboard boxes broken down for recycling, 3 large boxes of things for donation/give aways, and one tiny box of things I'm keeping. (And here's what's in that tiny box: The Map Man's high school ring, two honor society pendants, a bag of marbles, a tiny plastic box of tinier seashells, and an unopened package of "hello my name is" stickers. The marbles and the shells are for the kids. The ring and pendants are for memorabilia's sake. And the blank name tags....well, you just never know when something like that is going to come in handy. A seminar or convention could break out at any minute around here!)

Don't worry, I'll get back to posting about the kids, or the farm, or something more interesting than my STUFF at some point. But right now I'm trying to figure out a way to fit all that crap in the van to haul it where it's going....