Hoarders

I’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning around the house recently, you know, to get ready for the Chinese New Year and all. Okay, it’s not really because of the new year per se, but because I have visitors coming over and the house needs to not look like a war zone for a week or so. Typically, my solution to this sort of problem is to take half a day to relocate stuff from visible surface areas into cupboards to keep them temporarily hidden but this year, I thought I’d be good and actually clean out stuff like responsible adults do.

What’s that word people like to use? Declutter? Unclutter? GetRidOfJunk? Oh wait, that’s the word I like to use.

It basically means stuffing stuff into large bags and giving them away. I lack a certain sense of sentimentality when I’m in the getting rid of junk mode. If it hasn’t been used for a year, it’s gone. If it’s been under the bed and I haven’t bothered to extract it, it’s gone. If it’s mildly useful but I have nowhere to store it, it’s gone. And so on.

So I had all these bags all packed and left near the door ready to be given away when the kids walked by and saw a bag filled with their old toys.

Tru: Mom, why are all my toys in the bag? Are you throwing them away?

Me: No, we’re giving them away to other kids. You guys have too many toys, how about we share them? Sharing is good right?

He wasn’t really listening because he was busy ransacking the bag. He pulled out a plastic toy chili.

Tru: You want to give away my chili???

Me: Um…yes? You’ve still got like a whole bag of toy food and there’s no more space in your kitchen.

Tru: But how am I going to cook if there’s no chili? You like spicy food right? I need my chili to cook for you.

Me: *sigh* ok fine, keep the chili.

I thought that would be the end of it but that bag seemed to belong to Pandora so after the chili got pulled out, they sensed my weakness and started bargaining for other toys to be rescued.

“What??? My Hello Kitty is in there??” “I need my truck. Daddy bought this for me, you know?” “This is my lipstick!! I like it so much…”

By the time they were done, I had to unpack half the bag for them. So much for decluttering.