Well, it's happened, I am now a woman of a certain age. The big 4-0. Yeah, whatever, I really don't feel all that different from 30, or 35 or 39 for that matter. My beloved had the idea to throw the big surprise party and I did put the kibosh on that. This has nothing to do with any kind of angst about my age, I simply didn't see it as that big of a deal. Here's my idea for a perfect birthday, no matter what age I'm observing: I want to sleep until I wake up on my own, I want to watch what I want on the television and I don't want to cook unless I feel like it. That's about it, throw in a couple of "Happy Birthdays" and I'm pretty good to go. So far so good at this point. I think we're going out for dinner tonight and maybe I'll even have dessert...that's the plan.
Onward to this month's mission update:
Happily, I now have a digital camera so this will never plague me again.
The photo project begun with the delivery of somewhere in the neighborhood of 87 rolls of film to the drug store, it’s time to start going through every dresser, box and closet in the house. The goal is a search and rescue for neglected, forgotten or long lost items of clothing. Might as well start in Charlie’s room, as the youngest human member of the house, anything that doesn’t fit him can go away without argument, rationalization or plea for mercy. Since the dresser is the largest piece of furniture in the room, it seems like as a good a place as any to begin. The mission is clear, anything stained, ripped, unbearably ugly (though with my impeccable taste, not possible) or outgrown is GONE. A large lawn and leaf bag and three cardboard boxes are the only gear I need today, there will be no hesitation, no need for reinforcements, this is a simple, straightforward process. The easiest thing to do is probably to empty the drawers and get everything that currently fits in order. This is going to be a snap, the first two drawers yield nothing more than socks and a rather alarming amount of underwear for the little guy…did I just buy him more instead of doing laundry at some point? Probably.
Recently, putting his own clean clothes away has become one of Charlie’s responsibilities and with some interesting results. Instead of going the traditional, shirts in one drawer, pants in another, it appears he’s gone for an aesthetically pleasing format of clothing storage. One drawer has nothing but blue items, one holds only red clothes a third contains both green and yellow. From the looks of it, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with clothing that had more than one color and just stuffed the lot into the remaining empty spaces. Now, do I keep true to Charlie’s vision or do I do the control freak thing and sort things into what I deem a proper arrangement? I’ll keep to his method, after all, he is coming down to breakfast every morning appropriately attired and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
The contents of the dresser now piled (by color) on the floor, I turn my attention to the four gigantic Rubbermaid containers in the closet. This is where it’s going to get interesting as I started off labeling the outsides of the containers with the sizes of clothing stored inside and obviously abandoned that practice at some point in the long forgotten past…why? WHY? What kid wants to wear hand me downs? I should just chuck the lot and get it over with. No…NO, NO, NO! It would be completely irresponsible of me to throw away perfectly good clothing just because I can’t face the organizational sins of my past. Time to find a Sharpie and some large labels.
Three hours later, Charlie’s dresser is restocked, the clothing sorted by color instead of purpose, wasn’t that good and non-controlling of me? I realize the boy has more underwear than Mr. Hanes on his best day but his dresser is some kind of weird sock black hole. Still puzzling over that factoid, I turn my attention to the items that did not make the cut. I really should just toss it all, but I won’t. I resolved that I would do the right thing both environmentally and socially by donating as much as I could and only throwing away the clothes that are beyond reason. Okay, that’s done and I have two boxes to donate and only a dozen or so items to throw away. The storage containers are now clearly labeled and phase one of the clothing quest is complete. Woo-hoo!
I'll hit the teenager's room later...I think we're good for a couple of days.
