1st of the year CLEAN OUT!!

It is January 1st (or at least in this post anyway)...and we feel ever so inspired. Having a sick child will do that. Our plans were thwarted the day before early on the 31st of December...we were getting up early to head to Maryland for a friend's wedding when Adam woke up throwing up. Never a good thing but especially when you are going to be hosted by friends with 4 children of their own. We had to cancel our trip and spent the next 24 hours taking care of Adam and praying no one else caught the bug.

So comes Saturday, the 1st of January, in the midst of cleaning the house of germs and realizing all the new things we got for Christmas it was time to purge. A friend from church was sharing how she had each of her children (3) pick their 5 favorite toys and then she shipped everything else off to the Rescue Mission. Hmmm... this made me think...really 5 toys each so I said "so you have 15 toys in your house and that is it???" This really was too much for me to wrap my brain around but none the less I was inspired at her hard core approach. So the purge begins...

We brought EVERY toy in the house to the den...pictured above...I mean every toy. We were going to go through every "guy" (aka...action people, characters and Happy Meal toy), as well as every match box car, and every other misc. toy we have accumulated through 8 Christmas's, 12 birthday parties, and many other for no reason gifts our children have received!! As you can see this can be a very hard thing to do with the children...pictured below...Adam and Ryan have a battle with lightsabers...and Emily in the right side in her saucer...with Daddy entertaining. Were we crazy?? Probably but we did manage to get through every toy. We had 3 full (overflowing) 18 gallon containers to donate/sell at yard sale this summer and 2 or 3 bags of trash. It is amazing when you really pile everything up to see the excess. Now we in now way got close to 15 toys but we did manage to get rid of a lot of clutter and felt wonderful after doing it.