Holy Crap!

Operation Take Back the House (or Decrapification, as Rocket Man calls it) is in full swing. Unfortunately, today it interfered with my gym time, so Jillian Michaels and I will have a date later this afternoon.

I slacked off on laundry over the holidays. (I know! Me?) I washed and folded, just never hauled it up out of the basement and put it away. So today, I had a VERY full basket for each person in the house. (Pretty much, two weeks worth of clothes.) And I came to a realization...

The dressers are still full.

My family wore clothes for two weeks and the only thing they are running low on is socks. They could easily go for two more weeks without needing clean clothes.

Now, my old self would have said, "Hey, great! I can just do laundry once a month!" But my new Decrapifying Self said, "WTF? We have TOO MANY CLOTHES!"

And did I mention that my 3 older kids wear uniforms to school five days a week? Really, how many clothes do you need when 5/7ths of your wardrobe is predetermined? And also? How many pairs of PE sweatpants do you need in your dresser when you have PE twice a week? Hint: 8 is NOT the right answer.

This was a hard task for me. I don't like to waste things. I hate to give things away that I might need someday. I have saved almost every outfit the two older kids wore so the younger kids could use them. So really, I shouldn't ever need to buy clothes for the younger kids, right? But I do!

And I also get a lot of hand-me-downs, which I love. Especially because they are usually nicer brands than I would normally buy (which basically means, anything nicer than Target).

So, it is a hard thing for me to give away perfectly good clothes. Especially when they have Gymboree or Talbots Kids on the labels.

But really. It's out of control.

So I purged. And then I purged some more.

I pulled everything out of Little One's dresser. I became alarmed at the amount of underwear she has. So I started counting.

I am embarrassed to even write this on the internet for the whole world to see. But here goes:

She had 47 pairs of underwear in her drawer.

FORTY SEVEN.

That doesn't even count what might be in the laundry. I think it's safe to assume that we are over 50.

How did this happen? How does a kid end up with over 50 pairs of underwear and her mom just keeps cramming them in the dresser week after week? So I kept everything that had a princess on it and got rid of the rest.

Lord. I have a problem.

In the end, I filled two contractor bags for Value Village with clothes and coats. (I had purged those last week. Two coats per kid. No more. No matter how cute they are.) And a trash bag of non-princess underwear and other junk that is non-hand-me-down worthy.

I also threw in 2 suits and a dress from my working days. I'm having a hard time letting go of the last vestiges of my working wardrobe... as if I could jump up and march back to a job at any moment. But these babies were purchased in the 90s and had shoulder pads. Serious shoulder pads. I didn't get rid of it all. Baby steps.

I also tossed in a tool box that I bought in the EIGHTIES, when I decided that I was going to be crafty (ha) and make earrings. I made one. pair. of. earrings. And I've been hauling that empty tool box around ever since. Rocket Man keeps telling me to hang on to it, because he'll use it for something. But it's been TWENTY years. TWENTY. Time to go. Really.

Next up, purging my Christmas decorations, as I put them away. (Inspired by the Queen of Purging, Stimey.)