It’s been a whole week since I invited you to join me in organizing your children’s “stuff” and creating a FUNctional space for them to play. How’s it going? Over the course of this past week I can report back that I have been both productive and side-tracked, which is quite typical in my life as a mom. Have I completed the initial steps I talked about in my previous post, FUNctional Spaces ~ Getting Started? Yes. However, in doing so I created a whole additional project to tackle. One step forward two steps back. Perhaps I was a tad overambitious. Here’s what happened……

I managed to complete the “clean sweep” of the kid’s playroom. What I learned from this was that it was definitely a good idea not to toss the belongings out on the lawn, especially with the recent snow we experienced this past week. I also found it does not work to try to complete this task with children “helping” you. Twenty minutes into this project, my youngest was merging all the piles I had established, and was having no part of any “purge” that was about to take place. Forget that Elmo was missing limbs, “Melmo” was part of the family and was clearly staying! So, from that moment I knew this was a project to be embarked upon during nap time, and nap time proved to be extremely productive! I managed to toss what needed to be tossed, create several boxes to donate and send to Grandmom’s (as brilliantly suggested by a reader) and keep the items that needed to be kept. Additionally, I managed to find a home for some items an expecting mom to twins was in need of, and even schedule a pick-up with the Purple Heart for later this month. Now that’s what I call a successful week!

My shortcomings came when I became a bit overambitious. Wait, let me retract that statement and keep it real, it was a pure case of getting side tracked and sucked into the nostalgia of it all – the exact thing I warned about. The task at hand was about going through the children’s toys, but in doing so I came across some old children’s clothing. At this point I thought, why not go through all the clothing as well, and this is was where it spiraled out of control. My husband always teases me about my boys’ wardrobes, and it wasn’t until seeing the obscene amount of baby clothing I actually had, that lead me to almost think he has a point. I said almost! It also confirmed to me why we need to stop at two children, because in the slim chance we’d have a girl, I most definitely would need some type of support group, for all the precious little diva outfits that would no doubt feed my shopping addiction. But I digress. Going through the boxes, thinking it was only yesterday that my boys were that little, completely derailed my focus. While this is a project that also needs to be tackled, I really needed to FINISH the first project, before delving into this one.

So where do I go from here, now that I have boxes scattered all over the house of these adorable little outfits, that will never again be worn by my fast growing boys? I have decided I need to curb this project for the time being – put the items back in the boxes on the shelves and save it for a later date. Then, it’s time to continue creating the FUNctional space that was the primary focus of this exercise. And what’s the next step in establishing this space? Well, you’ll just have to stay tuned to see where we go from here……