Yesterday was the day! It was Job Offer day!!!!!!! Of course it is more than just an offer, it comes with the hope for better possibilities for the futures of each one of our seven children, each other and our marriage.

 I know that from this point out, no matter what, things will only get better. They may not go as I envision, they may not play out like my perfect fantasy but they will be better. And better is just what we need right now.

I was going to say that I will be super busy in the next few weeks preparing for our big life changes and probably won’t be blogging much but who am I kidding? Of course I’ll be blogging, ESPECIALLY now.

Can we talk a bit about purging? I don’t consider myself to be a pack-rat. We have a lot of stuff becuase there are 9 people in this house, 7 of them kids. Which means we have 7 sets of toys, books, coats, hats, boots, shoes, summer clothing, winter clothing, etc etc. No matter what, that is going to look like a lot of stuff. But also I am a consumer. I know it isn’t good but I am. It comes from years and years of being seriously seriously broke, never being able to buy nice things (or ANY things) for my kids, for myself. I’m making up for lost time. I’m a consumer. I’m aware of it and am working to change it but it is amazing the kind of purchases I can justify. Like this serger I have my eye on because I love to sew and wow, a serger would make sewing SO much better! Then I could sew lots and LOTS of stuff and SAVE MONEY! haha. But what I’m trying to say is that I’m not so much a pack-rat as a consumer. I don’t mind getting rid of stuff when we use up all our space. I do the annual pre-Christmas Toy Ditch. We go through books and purge the ones we’ve read or the kids outgrow. I admit I held onto 12 years of baby clothes out of sentimentality but I’m over that now. I’ve gone through them all and picked out 5 things to keep. Fair enough, I think. So what I’m saying is that, for the most part, I’m good at getting rid of things, I’m just better at buying new things.

But we will move. And People Say “You must purge before you move, bring as little as possible with you” and so we are trying to purge.

We moved 18 months ago and we purged then too. The purging looked like us throwing away everything we owed, and then some (see photo!). You’d think we would have had nothing to move after all we threw out. Apparently the movers thought so too because they so grossly underquoted us that they ended up needing THREE trucks to move us over two days. I guess they got shafted on that deal, huh? In our defense a lot of the crap we tossed was from the previous homeowners who left the two garages FILLED with junk and also the basement “dirt room” filled with junk. We had never gotten around to emptying those areas so we had to do that in order to sell the house. What we didn’t do enough of is purging our OWN stuff, apparently. We threw out a LOT of our stuff but not enough. And I promised we’d do it after we moved. When we’d have more time.

So then we had a new house full of stuff - mainly in the garage and the basement. We’ve gone through some of it over the last 18 months but not as zealously as I had hoped, mostly due to the constraints of ‘pay for trash pickup’ - something we never had in our old neighborhood and seriously restricts the purging process. We’ve gotten rid of some stuff but not enough. Again. And again I find myself thinking about how much easier it would be to purse things after we move. This time for a different reason though. This time it is more about not feeling like we HAVE to get rid of stuff. I don’t like feeling forced. I don’t like feeling like we MUST purge in order to move. I want to purge for the sake of purging.So here we are, facing another move, with a house full of stuff that needs to be purged. And here is where my mind goes:

“Should we get rid of these books? Books are heavy to move. But these books are used for research and help DH make money  and it would be crazy to sell them all now for little money just to turn around and have to buy them all again. It would be dumb to sell them off. Well there are those that he will never use but those are brand new and where could we unload them and make some money? I want to make decent money on something totally new. That’s only fair. Anything less feels like sacrificing. I don’t want to sacrifice, we aren’t poor, we can afford to move the books too. The books stay.”

And so it goes.

There are some things I have no qualms about getting rid of. Then there is the rest.

How do I get past this? Or maybe I don’t? Maybe its OK to take the things we like, use and need and not just ditch them all in the name of a move?

I know my target areas are the books, the toys and the homeschooling supplies. We have too many of all of those things. But they are also, by far, the hardest to talk myself into parting with. They all have Future Potential. They all are too costly to replace. They are things I value, things my kids value, things we love, things we use or might want to use in the future. haha. God, help me.

And then there’s the pets. Lord, the pets. We have 2 dogs, 4 cats, a reef tank, 2 turtles. I hate dogs, my boys love love love our dogs. So the dogs come on a trial basis but the cats? I don’t know what to do about the cats. Two of the cats hate us, one is great, one is seriously attached to us but has an affinity for peeing all over couches. Currently our cats live in our huge walkout basement and they are very happy. There are no basements in Houston. And the reef tank - we LOVE the reef tank but have yet to figure out how to move such delicate creatures across the country. It seems like we have no option but to get rid of the tank. And the turtles, undoubtedly, will have to come. They do not belong to me, they have been hand-raised by my son since infancy. What do I really want? NO PETS! I want to be able to go out of town without paying a million dollars in boarding, I want to be able to leave for the weekend without making plans for a house of animals. I want freedom. I want no pet hair. I want no vet bills. But sometimes, as parents, we don’t get what we want for the kids’ sake. And even if the kids were OK with it, as is the case with the cats, I’m attached. I don’t want to purge my cats. :-/ I just want a cat that doesn’t pee on my couch. That’s all

So talk to me about purging. How do you get past it? Do you have to get past it?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 3:17 pm and is filed under House Keeping, Moving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.