Girls Night (a.k.a. Parting with junk)

One of the things about blending families is that we have each had homes and lives of our own prior to now. Granted, we each lost many of our worldly possessions to other parties, but we each still have some stuff. Since Jim was living as a transient student for the last couple years, much of his stuff was in storage. He brought the cooking things to my house months ago for which I am completely grateful. Even more so everytime he comes over and makes dinner - which is almost every day. But I digress...

The task of the week was to bring his things up so we could combine and conquer; figure out what items of his and what items of mine we would be keeping and then part with the rest. I mean, we're going to be living in 800 sq. ft. for the next year. We have to be selective.

In order for this to happen, Jim enlisted the slavery charity of his youngest brother to drive down to where his storage unit was located and the girls had a sleepover with me. After way too late of a movie night, and sleeping in way too late in response, we spent the good part of the morning outside. As I was pulling weeds, Ellie dug in the dirt and "helped" me while lamenting that she doesn't have dirt to dig in at her mom's. She told me that they had planted a seed and watered it but it never did anything. Since property is a premium in SoCal (where she resides much of the time) I figured we needed to get that girls hands dirty. Aeryn is always wanting to grow things so naturally we headed to Wally-world to grab some terra cotta planters and bright paints. The rest, as they say, is history.

I aim for equal representation in pictures, but that is hard when one of the parties is quite resistant to looking at cameras.

I love these faces. They just plain scream "Fine, we'll pretend to look at you, but our minds are clearly somewhere else."

It is possible that they enjoyed scooping dirt far more than anything else with this little project, except maybe spraying the pots down with the hose after all was said and done.

And here is the final result. We planted marigolds and mini-sunflowers. Knowing the desire children have for instant results we decided to go easy and almost foolproof. Please oh please say this will work.

Meanwhile back on the ranch, the boys were heading into town (the storage unit was a few hours away) with a big fat load of everything under the sun. This was my garage shortly after Jim's return. Fortunately this is no longer my garage as he is seriously da-man and went through many things ASAP. That is probably a good thing since I need my house ready to list by July 1st. Heaven help me.

We quickly decided on some things and each loaded up out part-with-thems into the truck to end up with this insanity: (yes, it's nearly full to the back and 89.74628% of that was old baby and toddler clothes)

Which we promptly dropped off at the local thrift store, conveniently located across the street from the truck rental place.

In the end, things feel so much lighter already. Make no mistake about it, I have a serious ton of stuff to figure out still, but this was one burden gladly lifted for us both.