Still here. Still plugging away at life. Both kids are in school. Phil is.... Phil.
I'm super happy to finally have some time to myself but before I can even do that.. I've been clearing out and decluttering the house. I've donated so many things, I made more than 5 trips to Goodwill. I've given away so much on Buy Nothing. I feel lighter? For a very long time I really thought I should SELL everything that I don't want anymore and I've come to the realization that our house should not be a holding area for "stuff" that I need to sell. My house is not a store. I've let go of the amount of money spent on items and just said "eff it." Get it out of my house so I don't have to spend the mental energy on it anymore. When you constantly are thinking about your stuff, it's robbing you of the awesome things that you could be DOING instead.
I unloaded over 7 bags of clothes from my closets. It was stuff that was too small. Fancy work clothes that I'm not going to wear again. Old t-shirts. Old ill fitting clothes. Clothes that I thought I would wear. Clothes that I kept that I just LIKED but didn't wear. I started trying stuff on and wore it around for awhile and then put it in a pile if it made me itchy. If I have to dry clean it, I decided to donate it. I don't want to spend the time, energy, or money on dry cleaning unless I absolutely need to.
I have only tackled a small portion of toys. Unfortunately Baby Chewie doesn't play favorites with toys and so he has his interests in many things - cars, trucks, rocket ships, books, action figures, LEGO, trains, PJ Masks, and everything in between. And he has way too many cars. At least 5 bins. It's time for 3 of those bins to go.
I gave away all the wooden toys that I liked but got tosses aside. I gave away Barbies and babies and books. I can now go through all the Christmas and winter books - instead of putting those away I will post them on Buy Nothing and put the rest in the Free Little Libraries in the neighborhood.
And I decided not to buy books AT ALL this year until my library requests and my to read pile are down to nothing. I know. That's a HUGE challenge for me - there's two cookbooks sitting in my Barnes & Noble cart right now. So.... we'll see what happens...
