Ok. So, it’s been 4 years since this blog was created. I guess it’s about time for an inaugural post! Why nothing in 4 years? I can’t remember why I delayed posting at first…probably because I had a lot in my head, but not ready to write it. Then life took over. Then when I wanted to post, I couldn’t remember how to get to it. THAT’S HORRIBLE. But true. Fast forward four years…four bumpy, crazy, intense years…I decided to pull up my OLD blog…that I faithfully occasionally wrote in before this one was created by my husband. And low and behold, this one was right there with it on the same account. I swear, my brain has been barely functioning during these childbearing years. Gah!
My helpers today as I write my first post!
Anyway, I won’t go into great lengths of what all has happened in the last four-five years, other than this run-on synopsis: I’ve worked full time, part time, and at home (baking and decorating cakes, tutoring kids on handwriting skills), had a miscarriage, another year and a half of infertility after that, miraculously found out we were pregnant with Gideon and then miraculously (and shockingly) pregnant with Jak 5 months after Gideon was born (hence my non-functioning brain), attempted to short-sell our home after struggling with a few years of career and income changes forced upon us with the crazy economy and stupid housing bubble and some hasty decisions we had made and continue to regret, nearly ended in foreclosure as we burned through our savings and everything I could contribute while working before Jak was born while we waited for the realtor to do what we hired him to do, and just barely got our house sold in the nick of time with the incredible help of our new realtor that knows the short-sale runaround and coached us through the whole thing. (75 or more showings with no offers with the first realtor, immediate offers before the house was “officially” back on the market with the second realtor. If you need a realtor, TALK TO ME!)
Currently, we are renting from my family, in my late grandmother’s home. After the whole debacle with selling our home, we are admittedly scared of buying, and we haven’t even checked in yet as to when we CAN buy or what it will be like after the knock to our credit record. All of this, coupled with the craziness surrounding our move (Oh, I haven’t shared that part yet…), has led to a serious desire to DOWNSIZE. At least the STUFF we have that we don’t need. The crazy move: we rushed to get out of the house since our realtor said it would sell faster and be easier to keep clean, since we had a baby constantly making messes. So we moved in with my sister (who was renting my Grandmother’s house at the time). Which meant a lot of stuff had to go into storage, because also Grandma’s house still has a lot of her things in the basement. (The timeline of her last years made it hard to manage all of her belongings at once, so it has been a long process.) The two weeks before the move, Gideon and I kept getting sick back and forth with colds, then norovirus, then the flu. Three days before the move, we were unpacked and I was puking my guts out. Oh, I was also 6 months pregnant at that point. So we hired packers with what little money we had. Some of our stuff moved with us that day, and we had to pack the basement and move it LATER. The day we moved, Gideon’s 1st birthday, he got a fever and I had to take him to urgent care, while Andy and some gracious friends packed the truck.
So……it’s no wonder at this point, even two years later, we are still feeling like we are recovering from those events. The boys are finally old enough to entertain themselves better and I am in clean up mode. When the remainder of our stuff came from storage, it was mostly loaded into the basement and a lot of it has been untouched. We have realized how much crap we have, how hard it is to manage it, and how much of it we don’t even use. Ever.
Last year I discovered a post by blogger Ann Marie Heasley called 40 Bags in 40 Days on http://www.whitehouseblackshutters.com. I was ready then to start “decrapifying” as she puts it. But I lost steam after the first few days, because I was up against a mountain of clutter, and chronically exhausted from an almost one year old that was a horrible sleeper at the time and a two year old that was still dealing with sleep issues that started after we moved. BUT NOW. Now, I am ready.
Actually, I’ve been decluttering from various rooms in the house for several months now (especially the kitchen and my closet), and piling it all in a central location in our unused play room. Today is the first day of the 40 Bags in 40 Days 2015 challenge, and, fittingly, the non-profit that was supposed to come get my first big pile a few days ago bumped the pick up to today due to weather. So, this is what my front porch looked like a little while ago!
There are still a few things I’ve already collected that I will have to drive to Savers or something this weekend…and I may have a few more bags to add to it by then, because I am IN IT TO WIN IT this year. I’m ready to unload the weight of belongings that don’t mean anything or hold any necessary purpose any more. If you want to join the challenge, which coincides with Lent (so you can do it as a part of your Lent observation, or not, of course), check out her blog posts about it. She gives ideas of where to start, and explains the whole goal. It’s pretty great. I don’t really know how to make a link active here at the moment…but I’ll work on that tonight after my IT department gets home from work. 🙂 So, hopefully, you can find her blog without too much difficulty if you don’t want to wait.
I’ll try to update my progress here…probably more consistently on instagram. You can view my public account at @thesweetwong2. I’m sure I can make the link to that all fancy, too. Again…I’ll probably have to call my hubby, er, I mean, my IT support crew for help on that.