Purge, Purge, Purge

When we bought our house, we purged so much stuff.  Remember the 4 bags of VHS tapes??  Moving in here, I felt good about the things we brought with us.

Now, 3 years later, I find that more stuff has found its way into our house.   The buying  & selling of AG items has meant there are boxes & mailing envelopes that I'm keeping so I can reuse them.  Sunshine has celebrated 3 birthdays & 4 Christmases in this house---that's a lot of new toys. We try to donate/sell where we can but my girl's holding on to a lot of stuff for her future children.  Certain things I'm fine with but not every single item.

The past few months I've been taking stock of my yarn stash.  I have a lot of yarn.  I know, no big surprise, but it's true.  There's a 56 qt. bin filled with cotton, another that was filled with wool, two more smaller sizes with sock yarn & Koigu KPPPM.  Yes, Koigu gets it's own container.

As I've been on a purging rampage lately, I decided to tackle the guest room closet this morning.  After we moved in & started hanging pictures/art work, we found we had several (a lot) of large size frames & mats.  Rather than immediately bringing them up to the attic, we kept them in the guest room closet in a box.  Not the most attractive thing but it's the guest room closet.  My stash was in there as well so hopefully that would draw people's eye away from the monstrous Home Depot moving box filled with frames.

The box is now in the hallway as I'm waiting for Hunter to get home from an appointment so he can 1) decide what he wants to keep/throw away & 2) help me get the box into the attic.  

But, the stash? Totally culled.  I have a bag of yarn to sell/swap the next time my knitting group does a sale/swap night.  Some of it's on Ravelry for sale in the interim.  I have 3 grocery bags filled with various size balls of yarn that either are missing their wrappers or were used in some way shape or form.   They'll go to our school's Art teacher for future projects.  BTW, ask your child's art teacher if s/he is responsible for the supplies for projects or whether the school district supplies them.  I've mentioned several times how much we love SuperAwesomeSchool but our school district?  No love from me there.

Since I'm purging stash, I'm also on a self imposed yarn diet.  If I find I need to buy yarn for a specific project, then I'll buy it.  Hunter & I have a certain amount of money that we use monthly for fun stuff.  For several years, my "allowance" was spent on yarn/knitting accessories.  Well, I just don't need to do that.  Sitting on $1000 (more probably) worth of yarn is ridiculous.  I know, the me of 2006 would have thought I was insane for saying that.

Our Treasure Box Day went off without a hitch, as did the House Celebration on Friday.  We could have used more volunteers on Friday for the hair paint, but the 2 moms who came out to help me & the teachers who jumped in to help got it done.  This week I go into Book Fair prep. for next month.  I need to get my letter home written today so I can make copies tomorrow.  I also have to walk the grounds with the owner of a local bouncy house company. Our final House Celebration is going to be insane---we're going to have a bouncy house, water wars, water slide & one more inflatable.  I need to start lighting candles to Mother Nature!

Lastly, I am going nuts with anticipation today!   Sunshine has an AG doll  (Lanie)who needed to go to the doll hospital due to bad hair.  She was an ebay purchase that we fixed up together.  We washed & curled her hair.  Re-curled it when the initial curling didn't take & then steamed it to get it to take.  Sadly, it was too far gone & we realized it had been cut (luckily I didn't pay too much).  Before Christmas, Sunshine decided that she wanted to send Lanie for a new head.  Shameless mommy brag---my daughter is great about saving money.  And she'll do chores to earn money.  Last year she bought herself the AG Girl of The Year, McKenna ($105) & her Beam & Bar Set ($87) with her own money that she earned & saved.  If she knew I was bragging about this, she'd scrunch up her face at me & say "motherrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" in that annoyed way that only kids can do.  Anyway, she was saving her money for something & decided that she'd pay for Lanie's head.

We dropped Lanie off last Saturday while we were at the AG store in Atlanta & found out that she'd be arriving here today.  Fed Ex dropped her off this morning & it's everything I can do not to open the box!!

Maybe my Mom's right---I might be a bigger kid than Sunshine is!