Saying Goodbye To Stuff: Little Girl Clothes

We are focused completely on decluttering, organization and living a more minimal lifestyle right now. That means a lot of work and decisions on what to let go of, where to put things and finding a home for every belonging.

It's been a very delayed process, after our somewhat tumultuous first half of 2016, with broken foot and other things happening including winter weather, but we're finally going through stuff that we hastily packed when we left LA with just a couple of weeks notice in early 2015 and are getting our life back to a somewhat organized state.

It's been interesting to let go of things...stuff. One of the things I've been having a tough time letting go was all our beautiful little girl clothes. I think the sadness there is two-fold. One, we're letting go of our once little girl's clothes and learning to adapt to a pre-teen world of hormones, more independence and finding the place where effective parenting happens while allowing a young person to find herself, develop her life all the while still obviously needing parents to guide whether she's excited about that or not.

The second reason it's been hard is that we kept all our favorite little girl clothes hoping there would be another little girl who could wear those. That didn't happen and that is a heartbreaker. I was at a church function a few days ago and the word posterity came up and it just hit me a little bit that I would have no biological posterity in this life. I teared up. By no means do I overlook or am I ungrateful for the opportunity I've had to mother a child in my life. That has been a beautiful blessing, but when you realize you will never have your own biological children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren, and it's something you always wanted and expected you would have, that is sad.

We've joked in out family that the minute we give all those clothes away a little girl will somehow fall out of the sky into our family. If for some miracle we pull an Abraham and Sariah then the kid can have new clothes. She will have earned it.

I think one of the reasons it's been hard to give those kinds of things away is that we are giving away a big part of our history all at once. If I we had been giving stuff away little by little over the past few years it wouldn't sting as much because we wouldn't be looking at years of history. Now we're seeing The Bug's clothing she was wearing at three and four years old while in the same day doing laundry for a tall, gangly ten-and-a-half year-old girl who is all pre-teen smiles, hormones, grumpiness and horrifyingly embarrassed (at least half the time). It's a pretty stark contrast.

But I am trying to stay in a mindset that as we give away old things we're holding on to, whether they be belongings or just mental junk, that we open ourselves up to be filled up with new things we need. We make place in our lives for the present day and the future.

Last Saturday I took an entire (small) carload of things to the thrift store. It felt a little intense but I will say I have felt 99.9% relief (with only a smidgen of sadness) over having it all gone. That's a lot of space to open up for our lives. There had also been a good amount of stuff that has gone into the trash, and there will yet be further trips to the thrift store. But we're are definitely making progress which is so fantastic. I have to celebrate that progress every day. Every new empty box is a milestone and we've been emptying a lot of boxes the past few weeks. After merging two residences and a storage unit, we're doing pretty well.

So we keep chugging along and we're feeling encouraged. Last year at this time it had been about a month since we'd closed on our house and we were working like crazy. We had beautified the garage floor with the gray sprinkled epoxy protective coating, pulled out the giant planters in the kitchen and had the floors redone. We had removed the brick from the laundry room and put in new flooring there and the two downstairs bedrooms had been painted. Since then I don't think we've accomplished any big projects but now it's just getting everything in the house in it's place. In the future there will definitely be a lot of painting of the entire main floor - family room, living room, kitchen and dining room. We'll paint our master bedroom someday and the kitchen will definitely need some work. The tile countertops have a couple of spots that are losing grout with our daily use, so they'll need attention soon.

Oh, one quick note. Many of you have heard of the world famous Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta held here the first two weeks of October each year. We have a two bedroom, two bath townhouse vacation rental that is available, on a very last minute opportunity, for the entirety of the Balloon Fiesta as well as going forward. We'll be posting it on AirBnB but if you or anyone you know is interested let me know.

Thanks for coming by. I have a bunch of good posts in the works and look forward to sharing them soon.