Not Sure How to Take This…

Saturday was a busy day.  As in, we are definitely not prepared for Christmas to be 10 days away kind of day.  My mom was able to watch the kids while hubby and I ventured out into the insanity in an attempt to finish our Christmas shopping.  We were gone almost five hours.  It was productive, but not productive enough.

When we returned home, the kids said they had a surprise Christmas gift for my hubby and I, and that Grandma had helped them.  We were instructed to close our eyes, and they excitedly lead us upstairs.

When we reached the top of the stairs, they took us towards their Play Room.  Well, I think it was their Play Room.  It was a room above the garage in which you could SEE THE FLOOR and it was in the location of the OLD PLAYROOM where you couldn’t be sure it had a floor due to the toy disaster.

Backstory.  When we were trying to get our house built on the property we had fell in love with and purchased, we did a lot of moving.  A LOT.  We moved back to this area (where I grew up) in 2014.  We rented a home and kept most of our stuff packed in boxes.  We purchased our land but needed to move out of that rental, so we proceeded to move into one and then eventually another furnished rental, all in the span of 2 years.  Furnished meant that we really only unpacked clothes and a few necessities.  This left a lot of the kids’ toys (especially the ones they had really grown out of and forgotten about) in boxes that we moved along with us, or put in the storage unit.

Finally, in May, we were able to move into our forever house, and all the boxes came together. Hindsight tells me we should have purged the boxes before we just moved everything marked “Toys” into the Play Room, but hindsight is never super-helpful at the present moment.  So the kids dug into many, many boxes of toys that were missing pieces, that they had outgrown, and that they didn’t even remember having.  The playroom exploded, and not having enough storage containers caused it to just be a sea of crap.  A sea of toy crap.

I have made several attempts to clean it up.  I started sorting everything into piles, and the kids even helped here and there, but because I could only ever devote barely an hour at a time, the kids would end up destroying the piles and we’d be back at the beginning.

So when the kids lead us into a completely cleaned up Play Room, I literally had tears in my eyes.  It was one of those projects I had walked by daily, and it had been a daily reminder of really what a failure I was.  I just shook my head every time I looked into that room, and I cussed myself out each time we had to venture in there to find something for show and tell or to look for a specific toy.  I just couldn’t find the time or the energy.

My mom must have felt some pain looking at that room too, because right after hubby and I left for shopping, she said to the kids, let’s give mommy and daddy a Christmas present! And up they went.  It’s not complete.  They sorted a lot, and put things in the bins we have.  I still need to tackle each “category” and find some better bins and purge, purge, purge, but OMG it’s such a huge start. We were even able to finally pull up the plastic carpet protector we had put down during moving.

Here’s our Christmas present from our children:

We honestly could not see the carpet before their hard work.

There is a part of me that hurts every time I think that my mom had to finally take it into her own hands to get the room clean.  I feel slightly embarrassed that once again her completely unorganized daughter couldn’t get a handle on her life.  I know it has been very difficult to find a 5 hour window of time that I could prioritize on this project…there’s just too many other things that need my attention that are more of a priority than a messy kids’ room.  Moving forward all I can hope is that we can keep it this way.  The thought of my mom seeing it return to how it was after all her hard work will hopefully keep me on my toes!

Wish me luck…