More Momentous Than it Looks

There are two cabinets in my house that every single time I open them, I have to unhinge the child locks on them. You may have noticed that my youngest child is four and a half. And also, all my kids are better at opening the locks than I am, due to their small, nimble fingers.

So I pried the locks off of the cabinets and threw them away.


And then I started thinking about all the little outlet covers that were still littered all over my house and so I went around and pried all of them out.


I like this next photo because if you look really closely, you can see the little rings around the outlet that have been covered for, literally, the past five years. This is a kitchen outlet near the stove, and evidently I haven't been cleaning the grease off of it. Oops.


These ten items represent the last of the child proofing that had been in my house. I'm now a totally child lock-free house. Yippee!

Clothing Purge

Through regular seasonal changing out of my kids' clothes and some purges from my and Alex's closets, we've managed to put together a pretty good haul of clothing to get rid of.

These are outgrown summer clothes (and an old backpack) that I purged over the summer.


Here's a big ol' pile of clothes that Alex got rid of. I added a bunch that didn't make it into the photo.


This is the most recent bunch, which I got rid of last week when I packed my kids' summer clothes away for the winter. These are clothes that my kids have outgrown or that one of them (*cough*Quinn*cough*) refuses to wear. I'm a little sad because a few of these are some of my favorites. I hope that someone else will get some good use out of them.


I'm guessing 40 items or so.

The Fridge and Visual Clutter

One of the things that can make a room—in this case, the kitchen—look cluttered is a whole lot of tiny things on the walls. Or, alternately, on the fridge:


All of that was right there at eye level in a place that I walk by dozens of times a day, and very little of it actually gets used. So I purged.

Unless a magnet had strong sentimental value or important information, I got rid of it. I replaced the large, mismatched flat magnets with cute, matching round magnets.*

I also consolidated what I left on the fridge in one area, so as to leave large expanses of empty space to diminish visual clutter.


I got rid of ten magnets and a list of house rules that has been entirely ignored by my family. Even though I made them all sign it. They did find time to graffiti on it, however.


Total items discarded: 11


* I got these magnets as a freebie at an Office Max fundraiser for teachers I attended at Janine's house. Also, if you know a teacher who could use an Office Max gift card to buy school supplies with, go by and enter Janine's contest by nominating him or her.

I did bring in 17,000 rubber bands too, in the form of three rubber band balls that I dropped in the street right outside Janine's house and had to chase down the sidewalk, but I'm not subtracting them from the count.