I’ve been asking Tom to take the kids away for a few hours because I needed to throw myself in a black hole and hope I made my way back out.
Neko’s room. It scares me.
Those of you whose kids are under the age of three, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, because when Neko was that age, I, too, was naive. Her room was a cute little nursery with everything placed just so. But then she got a little older and all of a sudden, it began. The HOARDING. Scraps of packages. The endless paper that comes home from preschool, toys that have trucked in from the playroom and never made their way back out, and weird little pieces of ribbon and pipe cleaners and goodness knows what else. It’s one of those moments when you think, “You have only been in this world for five years. How could you possibly accumulate this much stuff?” And then I break out in hives thinking about what the volume will grow to by the time she packs her bags for college.
When Tom took the kids to his mom’s this morning, I made my move. The first photo is all the stuff I removed from her room that did not belong there. Some of it trash, others I needed to move to the playroom, laundry room, or into the great beyond.
The second is the “after” photo. I removed a bookshelf that held baskets which were only enabling the hoarding problem, and replaced it with this IKEA coffee table, which I hope will also be used as a sitting-height desk.
Other than the bed and play-tent, her bedroom now contains the following:
books
Rudolph Christmas toys (loved so much they stay out all year)
Rudolph Christmas globe
Playmobil Ark
Toy Story family
one basket of small stuffed animals
beanbag of large stuffed animals
regular beanbag
Playmobil dinosaurs
Yo Gabba Gabba dolls
Little Einsteins rocket
two small suitcases
markers
paper
clock
the orchid
Okay, I know you didn’t really need to know the details, but the fact that the list is only 16 items long makes me beam from ear to ear.
And, yes, there are about a zillion other toys in the playroom, but I have control over cleaning those up. I can stack and sort and purge in the dark of night while the children sleep. The bedrooms? That’s trickier.
I know my days of being able to do this are numbered. As she gets older, a purge like this will be a violation of trust and boundaries. But for the moment? It was exhilarating.