I Think I’m Expired

I have to say, as much as I love the holidays I love this part of the year too!  No more events or fancy decorations and parties.  Those are fun, but I’m a homegirl.  I like to be home and settled in with the family.  The cold weather and no particular place to be lends itself to just snuggling up in warm clothes and having normal, quiet days together.

This past weekend we began what I call my Tax Season Project.  There will be a DIY portion of the project later, but the first few weeks are all about cleaning out and rearranging.  The boys are moving all around and changing their rooms.  Not big changes, except Levi is moving out of the nursery (sniff::sniff).  I’m not adjusting well to that, but Levi is pretty excited.

Since the kids had the bed arranging under control, I decided to spend Saturday cleaning out my bathroom.  It had been a while since I really, REALLY cleaned it out and the drawers and shelves were beginning to overflow.  I asked Elijah to help me, and off we went into the great abyss.  The amount of dust alone meant we were going to be sneezing for hours.  Yep, it was bad.

From my little bathroom I filled TWO WHOLE kitchen trash bags.  It’s hard to imagine where it all came from, but there it was.  Junk.  Bags and bags of junk.  After pulling the 20th bottle of unused lotion from a drawer I started to wonder if I have a problem.  I don’t have a lotion-collecting problem, I have a I-feel-the-need-to-keep-every-gift-even-if-I-don’t-like-it problem.  One drawer was literally filled with gifts from sweet friends of bath products that I never use.  I’m not fond of many smells and am unlikely to put them on my body.  So I will thank my friends for their generosity and toss it in a drawer only to throw it away 10 years later.

After that it was time to clean out the medicinal products.  It had been a while since I had reached all the way to the back of the cabinet, as evidenced by this bottle of something…

Sad.  Just sad.

I think what happens is I so rarely use any over the counter meds that I buy them when it feels urgent, then use a few doses and don’t think about it again.  It will be years later when another need arises, so I assume I don’t have any and go buy more.  Then in 2013 I end up finding 17 expired, mostly full bottles of medicine in the back of the cabinet.  I threw them all away and made a section in a drawer where they will be easy to find from now on.

I re-organized my make-up, the travel supplies, extra toothpaste & shampoo, got it all spiffy.  What’s weird is if you had walked into my bathroom before Saturday it would have seemed organized.  Everything was in its place.  But I had so much stuff I never use that it was wasting good storage space and making it hard for me to use what I need every day.

On my open shelves are only the products I use almost daily.  I made this picture big so you can see what they are, if you’re curious.

This week, in addition to enjoying my freshly cleaned bathroom, I’ll be doing school and having plain, old normal days.  We will continue to power away at the room arranging and hopefully have it finished by the weekend.  Got to stay on schedule people.

I hope you have a wonderful, simple, well organized week.