Cleaning House

One of the things that I noticed on my vacation was that there was much less stuff down there than we have up here and it was so much easier to keep neat.

My daughter had a very limited amount of toys there and was able to quickly clean up herself. She was also not bored with less toys to play with all at once (and trust me, I don't think she has a lot of toys to begin with.)

When I got home I immediately cleared out 1/2 of the toys in her room. I put them in a closet to sort at a later date. She and I love it. She can't put it into words but I think it's the feeling of openness in her room. Everything is more restful and stays neater.

Yesterday I wondered why, if we only have 3 people living in this house, do I have 16 dinner plates in the cabinet?? I do have nice size kitchen with a lot of cabinets so I just put them all in there when we moved in. FOR WHAT? I put them in a cabinet (along with a bunch of other things (10 tea cups anyone? ) in the dining room today-If we have guests we'll just be eating there anyway. And now I have open space!

Why does my one child have 5 different child's plates? Where did they even come from? I know one was a gift and I think grandparents bought the others. I wash dishes every day so it's not like she'll ever use 5 dishes! I kept the beautiful ones we got as gifts that we didn't let her use at first (what!!)

This whole thing has my husband and I talking about living smaller and downsizing our things even more (mind you we moved here only 18 mos ago and it seemed like we had de-cluttered at lot at the time.) Apparently we have more work to do before we reach our comfort level with it.