Thursday, August 15, 2013

Moving On

I hate throwing things away.

Trash, I get it. The box is empty, it goes in the trash. The mushrooms have mold on them-DEFINITELY in the trash. Preferably the outside trash can.

But clothes? Books? It hurts.

Trey and I are getting ready to move, because, y'know, it's been almost two years since we've done that. And as part of the preparation we are going through our books, clothes, household goods and setting things aside that we no longer want or need.

Trey says I have a lot of stuff. I tell him it's OUR stuff, now that we're married. But we do, indeed, have a lot of things.

Ask my mother and she'll agree that I hate throwing things away. I get it from my dad. He can find sentimental a piece of paper with a scribble or some random phone number on it. Ergo, clothes that I haven't worn in years (literally) have made their way from North Carolina to Virginia with me. Books, too.

It was pretty easy with the books, though. Any textbook got pulled off a shelf. Even I do go back to school it'll be for something for which my archaeology book is irrelevant (I kept one, though).  Any novel/memoir/etc that I didn't feel the need to reread got pulled off a shelf.

Clothes were different. For some reason I hold on to clothes. Especially clothes that are a size or two smaller than the me now. My excuse is "I'll be able to wear that someday!" I've been saying that for a while now. So, I sucked it up, pulled them out of the drawer and put them in a bag.

My mom cleaned out my childhood room a few months back and brought me eighteen years worth of stuff. I really think I cleaned that stuff out TOO well. Every now and then I'll think "Omigosh did I throw _____ away? Do I still have it??!!" and I don't want to crawl through the crawlspace to find out that I did throw it away.

I still have my Beanie Babies, Barbies and American Girl stuff. I will NOT give that away. At some point in the future I might have a child or two you could potentially be interested in playing with it. Or laughing at how his/her mother could have possibly played with something so definitely not AI.

Good luck to me.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Rent A Kid

There was a movie, sometime in the mid-1990s called "Rent-A-Kid." The premise of the movie is to rent kids from the local orphanage out to families, I guess to "test run" them before adopting them. I vaguely remember watching this movie, but I remember at the time I thought that was stupid. Why on Earth would you want to rent a kid? I mean, you either wanted kids or you didn't.

HOLY COW it is SUCH a good idea!!!

Trey and I are now at an age where family and friends are having children and those children are having birthday parties. We are even invited to them! In the last two years, I have been invited to so many kid birthday parties. It is amazing to me how many.

So, today, we were at the birthday party of the little girl I babysit, who just turned two. No joke, we were the ONLY ones there without kids. Yes, some parents are baby babies, but they all had kids. All of them.

Then, I thought back to the other parties we have gone to. For probably 98% of them we have, again, been the only people without children.

And let me tell you, it's a little awkward. I don't have any "my kid did/said/pooped the funniest thing the other day" stories. I don't commiserate about toilet training, changing clothes every couple of ours, or talking about why my child has started biting the dog.

Don't get me wrong; I absolutely love that I get to be a part of this. It's fun, I get cake and the kids are just so adorable.

But...I wish there was something like "Rent a Kid" that allowed people (background checks, of course) to rent a child for a couple of hours for events, like birthday parties where they are going to be only childless person there. Trey and I joked about this on the way home from the party, and of course a company like this would never, ever happen. But still...the idea is appealing.

We also "joked" about borrowing our oldest niece for things....