Progress

or Torture?
So as some of you know, I have a bit of a hoarding problem that I've been working on. The other night, during one of the periods the internet was down and I didn't feel like reading (!) I turned on the tv and - yay - found Hoarding: Buried Alive was on.  That show gives me hope, lights a fire under my fanny.

The past few days I've been walking around here at loose ends. I want to do something, but just don't really know where to start.
Eventually I decided a good place to start would be to work on my Collections. It's a long story, but basically I have several Collections of Stuff that I can't (won't, same difference) get rid of.
My Collections take up a lot of room around here, so I decided the best place for them would be in the attic.

We have a Hip roof, with a large gas furnace right in the center, so our attic doesn't have a whole lot of storage room. And, the last time I stored some things up there, squirrels got in and chewed and poo'ed and messed stuff up. But, I had that stuff stored in cardboard boxes and plastic bags. It occurred to me if I store stuff up there in plastic storage containers, maybe they'd be safe against pesky intruders.

I have several of the plastic storage containers around here, just filled with other stuff, so first I had to sort through some of those.

There were four of them upstairs that I knew were filled with "Memories": old t-shirts, school papers, vacation souvineers, personalized doo-dads, and so on and so on.

One of things I kept was the boys' old ball caps, mostly from their Little League years. There was a couple of caps that were Ryan's because he was more of a cap wearer (like his Dad) when he was little. But he's not sentimentally attached to his old caps, especially the baseball ones, because they never were that interested in baseball and only played because I encouraged it.
So, no problem, I think, I can get rid of the ball caps without remorse.

But then I see these. Personalized. My kid's names.
Ok, I tell myself. That's ok. There's other boys out there named Kevin and Ryan that would probably enjoy having a cap with their name on it. It'll be ok.

Then I see these! Our family name!

Then I found this Frog costume that my sister made for Kevin about a million years ago.
Had it been anything but a frog, I think I would be okay with it, even though she made it, but frogs are, like, our thing. (Croaker - frog - get it?)

Then I found Ryan's old "Goin' to Grandma's" bag. This came after he got too old for a diaper bag, but still had stuff to carry: drink box, snacks, clean outfit, small toys, paper and crayons. He carried that thing all.the.time. 
Then there's the bag he made at one of his Vacation Bible Schools. I keep thinking I'm not that sentimentally attached to it, but then I'll see his name wrote inside, or I'll think, but that's still a good, useful bag, I could use it for something, and it was his.

Then I came across a bag of my kids' old (like nearly 30 years old) baby blankets and crib sheets.
Sweet as they are, I decided any DILs I ever have will probably want New stuff, in whatever Matching Set they choose, and not my old, used, mis-matched stuff, so I might as well give to someone who might could use it, right.
I no sooner thought it, that the very next things I came across included MY pink baby blanket. And it is precious to me, and I'm glad to have it, and here I am standing there contemplating getting rid of my kid's baby blankets!

So, yeah, I'm having a pretty hard time with dealing with this this un-Hoarding thing.

You know what doesn't help at.all? J looking in the box of stuff I was able to get rid of and start asking "Why you gettin' rid of this?", or saying "I wanna keep that".
I was like, "I WANT TO KEEP ALL OF IT!!!!! BUT I CAN'T, CAN I??????"