Cleaning for Company

Today I was in such a funk. (So much for the Devotional talk I was so excited about yesterday!) I was preaching to myself with that anyways. But maybe I'm not a lost cause... maybe being aware is the first step. I was very aware that I was not thinking positively, so that's good. Bad thing was that I didn't want to think positively - the natural man in me somehow enjoyed my bad mood and I thus wanted to continue the miserable wallow in my grumpy attitude. I'll blame the cloudy gray weather. I could feel myself continuing the downward spiral and figured I just best help myself hurry and hit bottom so I could start to come back up again. A few calls to vent friends and family and then I was able to turn around and function again. Yay.

So I think my funk was mostly caused by the basement. And that had become something I had to reconcile with because we have 3 house guests coming for a few weeks (through April) and we had to make a space for them, and that was the only place for it. Our friend Angela is coming to visit. Corey and Angela know each other from his mission days when he was a missionary working in the Santiago West Mission office, where she worked too. Angela saved us when the PDI in Chile wouldn't let me come back to America after our 5 months there. She came to the blessed US of A in October 2012 for a visit and now is returning and this time she's bringing two of her daughters. Here is a picture of all of us from 6 years ago.

All those little kids are bigger now. Her oldest daughter is on a mission for the LDS church in Lima Peru, awesome, so it's just Cata and Gabriella that are coming. they are Ethan and Joseph's ages (I think?)

So, I got out of the funk when I stopped thinking how much I wish the basement was finished and how we don't have a good space to put them, and stopped telling myself we can't host people very well. My overwhelmed bad mood that had persisted all day turned a corner when I told myself I had two choices:

1. Just shove all the stuff out of the way into a big pile of junk and call it good.  OR ~
2. Just get rid of all of it. 

If it's just a pile of unwanted or unused junk anyway, then really, why don't we just be gone with it? Sure, there are a few things in the boxes here and there that are truly misplaced treasures, but most of it's just there to sap my energy! So, a year ago I organized the basement, and all the winter and summer clothes were put into lettuce boxes that took me several Costco trips to acquire. Well, I've moved all clothing into the laundry room, thus now most of those boxes are empty. It's gonna take me a few months to throw them out in the recycling on trash day, but hey! (lightbulb above my head) if I fill them with all this junk, then I can drop them off with the load of donations at the DI! Brilliant, that could be a win win!

So I didn't do my plan A of going to the temple for date night. Instead we cleared out junk and the kids were around to cast their donate or keep vote for different items. Didn't get the van totally full, but did get a lot of unused stuff in there and I'm already feeling lighter.

Toys just don't last long at our house, as you can see from this old post. I even gave away some vintage "My Friend" dolls - like 3 mikeys that I bought for the kids for Christmas in 2006. Poor 6 year old Joseph,.. his mom bought him a doll for Christmas! But I did have my seamstress sister in law make some cute Jedi clothes for it. I wanted Mel and Joseph and Ethan to play together. I don't think it ever happened. I have held on to them for 11 years anyway, but we said goodbye this week, 2 Becky, 2 Jenny. Someone out there who wants to put in the effort might feel like they scored a pretty sweet find at the thrift store - you could get $15 bucks each for those, good luck. As for me, I'm just happy to pass them along and have them gone. Time again to try and help let things that don't matter to me fall out of our life.