Decluttering

I originally planned to write about my family's attempt at potty training my son over the Christmas holidays, but since already covered the potty humor for the day, I'll have to course-correct and find something else to write about.

Thanks, Tammy. For nothing.

Actually, I have a secondary blog topic, also related to post-holiday family events, and I think it will work quite well.

Decluttering.

If your family is anything like mine, your kids get a ridiculous amount of graft over the holidays. New toys. New clothes. Candy. ADHD. This means that when the Christmas crash occurs (that time when everyone and everything runs into a proverbial - and sometimes literal - wall) the natural impulse is to start getting rid of some stuff.

For Rachel and I, the decluttering began with the kids' toy room.

Once upon a time it was a beautiful dining room, with hard wood floors, a gorgeous rug, some neat antiques and a nifty little vibe. It still has the hardwood floors, but everything else is gone, replaced by a menagerie of cars, dolls, boxes, bags, balls, tea sets, dresses, costumes, hats, and various other childhood essentials, all stored neatly on shelves or in baskets.

Theoretically.

The truth is, most of that stuff just gets crammed into whatever available space my kids can find when the clean-up song begins. This leads to an overwhelming sense of clutter - random things in random places with no discernable order. Just looking at the choas leads to a feeling of depression, hopelessness, and despair. You'd almost rather toss some gasoline and a match on it than try to actually pick it up and organize it.

But that's arson. And apparently, it's illegal. Or at least frowned upon by insurance agencies.

So, with the Christmas decorations down and the cleaning supplies out, we decided to go ahead and purge the toy room. To get rid of the effluvia. The flotsam. The jetsam. The unnecessary and relentlessly annoying crap that absolutely, positively had to go.

We emptied every container into the middle of the living room. A pile of toys grew steadily into a mountain, and what I had hoped to contain in a few kitchen garbage bags suddenly required a large rolling bin. We were merciless: no sentimentality allowed as we tossed in toys from Ella's first years or stuff that Jon still played with despite his being too old for it. We got rid of a vacuum set, a cash register, a firetruck, several Care Bears, a large Elmo (highly satisfying to toss that one), countless kids meal toys, trains, blocks, baby cars, baby dolls, some purses, a few bits of play money, an unfortunate looking Barbie doll, and the head of some long-lost action figure.

While we amassed this pile of clutter, we also strategically re-organized the playroom with all of the toys that were new or near-new or were simply un-tossable. Slowly, the playroom resembled a real room again: shelves, lined neatly with a nice selection of toys, yet free from the madness of too much stuff.

And when I rolled that massive tub of stuff out of the house and loaded it into the back of my car, it was the final act of decluttering.

We breathed a cleansing sigh of relief.

Of course, it didn't take my kids thirty-five seconds to undo all that we'd done, but there was much less mess, and that was in itself a victory.

But all of that clearing out and decluttering got me thinking about myself - my mind is a pretty fair psychic version of that cluttered toy room: random crap shoved into random places, and sometimes, I get paralyzed by the commotion. I need to rid myself of some of the things that hold me back, things like cynicism, egoism, the need for approval, the need for peace at any cost, the fear of failure, the fear of being unliked. I need to mercilessly assess the baggage that I carry and toss out those things that hinder me.

Negativity. Hopelessness. Procrastination. Selfishness. The list could go on.

I wrote yesterday that I want to be positive in 2012, so that means the negative must go. Or at least put in its proper place.

Time to declutter my soul. How about you?