Kidclutter: gone.

If you're familiar with my list of 40 things, you might remember that one of my goals is to rid my home of 100 pounds of clutter this year.

Not just garbage...clutter. 100 pounds of garbage I could generate in, like, an afternoon. I can't clean anything without using a roll and a half of paper towels, and I'm famous for buying cheap cuts of meat with great intentions and allowing them to go bad in my fridge. Also, we suspect that the two-year-old is forever throwing things in the trash without our knowledge. Heavy, expensive things. I don't actually know whether he does this, but after we've searched for missing things for as long as we can handle, that's what we assume has happened. ("I dunno. Jack probably threw it out.") So he's taking the blame for it either way.

Anyway...clutter. Joy and Will produce it at an astounding rate. They share a room, and it's not big. It undergoes a pretty predictable cycle.

1. I help them to clean out the entire room, including the closets, the closet floors, the bookshelves, and under the beds and dressers. They either abandon this project or become extremely annoying in the process (which I'm starting to think may be intentional), and I finish it by myself.
2. I trot them around the room and, using a tone that is both slightly boastful and discernably reproachful, I show them where everything now lives and point out that this is what a clean room is supposed to look like.
3. For six hours the room remains clean due to grouchy vigilance on my part.
4. The following day the room descends into utter chaos. Again, Jack is blamed, and again, I can't tell how responsible he really is. I make bad faces and tell them to cleanupthisroomrightthisminute.
5. When they clean it up, a few things are left astray in hidden places.
6. We repeat #4 (with progressively less grouchiness for a while) and #5 until even when it is ostensibly cleaned, for some reason I cannot walk through the room. This seems to defy the laws of physics in some way.
7. I finally (and often without warning) reach the point where "Mommy can't take this anymore!!!", and we return to #1.

Good grief. I need to relax a little, I'm thinking.

Anyway, today we were at #1 and #2. I spent a good chunk of the day decluttering the room. There are two big boxes of toys and books that will be evaluated for relocation (to the family room), donation, or disposal. Beyond that I had 10 pounds of clutter that just got bagged up and added to my already-impressive collection of kitchen trash. 10 pounds! Woo hoo!

Here are some things that I discarded in great quantities from their room:

• Unsharpened holiday-themed pencils. Halloween and Christmas, mostly. There are so, so many of these that I'm becoming convinced that they're secretly reproducing somewhere. Scrounging for a pencil in the middle of March and being unable to find anything but an unsharpened Santa pencil is both irritating and depressing, so I'm declaring war on them. In the trash they go.
  
• Happy Meal toys. I'm really gunning for mother of the year in this post.
• Lollipop sticks. Behind someone's headboard. We had to have a conversation with one of our kids about this one.
• Barbie shoes. This I don't understand. We have a total of one Barbie in our home. She is unable to buy her own clothes. Is she ordering them online?
• Cheap stuffed animals. Blergh.
• Paper!! I thought it was grownups that were supposed to struggle with this. Notices, drawings, instructions for toys, certificates...they're getting a head start, I guess.

In the end, though, it felt really good to get it all out of there. And I bet the boxes downstairs will yield at LEAST another ten pounds, maybe twenty, that will leave our home. Maybe this time around I'll lighten up and be patient enough to teach them how to keep the room clean.

I don't know what the odds are. But, hey, Jesus is pretty big. Anything's possible. :)