My parents visited last weekend and brought another carload of CRAP. They did not bring my bicycle, but they did bring:
- 5 pairs of my old baby shoes, none of which Piper can wear (3 too small, 1 too trashed, 1 with soles so thick and hard I don't know how I ever learned to walk). My mom knew the too-small ones were too small when she put them in there. She brought them anyway.
- An assortment of clothes, baby clothes, books, and toys that I had put in the give-away bag before we left Michigan. I put them in the garbage bags along with the rest of the stuff my mom had designated for her monthly Purple Heart pick-up. The give-away stuff is always collected in the same spot at her house. She would've had to root through all the other stuff just to pick out the sackfuls of useless-to-me things she brought.
- A pile of fairly hideous 80's baby clothes that belonged to my siblings & me. All of which are either years too big or many months too small for Piper to wear.
- A crate of Fisher-Price Little People toys that, while pretty cool (and only partly because they are the old choke-sized ones), Piper can't play with for at least another year. She is too hard on things right now to turn her loose with so many small, fragile parts.
- A stack of baby/kid books, 98% of which I can't give to Piper because they are either too old and completely falling apart, or they are not the thick cardboard-paged kind, which means she will shred them. She's extremely hard on books.
- A crate of my siblings' and my old baby/preschool toys, in various states of crumbling decay. One shape-sorter dissolved into tiny plastic shards when we tried to wash it.
- My old Fisher-Price "School Days Desk," which was a beloved toy of mine, but is made to be used by someone 7 or more years old.
- YET ANOTHER crate of Piper's outgrown baby clothes. I'm pretty sure this is the last one, because it has a lot of things I couldn't find (like the tiny onesies we decorated for her when she was a newborn). If there are any more crates of clothes lurking about, I will probably set fire to them because I am so sick of trying to find storage space for it all and ye gods people bought us a lot of foofy pink atrocities.
- A HUGE crate of Lego Duplos, which I specifically told my mom Piper is not quite old enough to play with. She doesn't have the dexterity yet to put the things together and get them apart; all that will happen is she'll stick two pieces together and then scream because she can't undo it. I don't need any more reasons for her to screech, thank you.
- A random assortment of kid-sized silverware (there's like one fork, 5 spoons, and a butterknife). Plastic bowls bearing cartoon approximations of the characters from Willow. Willow was our favorite movie when we were kids, and my mom dutifully saved UPCs from boxes of Quaker oatmeal to get a bowl and matching spoon for each of us. She could only find one of the spoons, and I don't know what the hell I am going to do with these, but I don't think I can bear to throw them out.
I honestly don't know what the F my mother expects me to do with all this stuff. When I try to tell her to stop bringing it, she only whines "It's your stuff. You wanted it. You asked for it. I didn't do it. You wanted it."
It's all still sitting in mountainous piles in the living room. Piper has managed to scatter a lot of it throughout the house. The house is usually ankle-deep in debris by the end of the day anyway, because she just goes from room to room destroying things and making messes faster than I can clean them up. The debris is knee-deep now, and I am teetering on the brink of a full-scale meltdown because my house is so messy. I have been struck down with a malady that required an actual doctor's visit and medications, and Ryan has had an hellacious school week plus a part-time job, so we haven't had much chance to go through it, much less drop off the stuff we don't want at the Goodwill up the road. Therefore, the piles and clutter and junk have been spreading all week and I have been edging closer to insanity.
The house was spotlessly clean and 85% totally organized before my parents showed up; only three closets (one each in the spare bedrooms, one in the hall) remained for me to divide, conquer, and organize. Earlier this month, my house was so clean and organized that not only did I go to bed at a reasonable hour three nights in a row, I spent one entire naptime reading a book because I had done all the things that I usually try to frantically accomplish during that 1.5-hour window every day. My home was organized and my brain felt wonderful because of it.
Now it looks like somebody is setting up a thrift store in here.
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