On Saturday mornings, the kids are responsible for cleaning their rooms. A good clean, like every corner of their room before Sunday putting away laundry day, so I can walk through it without stepping on nine hundred items.
Olivia’s half-assed it the last few weeks, so today I decided to do a toy purge while she was at school. I organized her books, took a bunch out that were too young for her, moved them to Violet’s room, and cleared out the five baskets filled with random toys, organizing them into Shopkins, American Girl accessories, headbands and other accessories and left a couple open so she could put into them what she like. I picked up the Lego off of the floor and from under her bed and put it away, high in the closet because it’s not played with and just left on the floor.
I found so many papers, drawing, scribbles, wrappers, hanging tags from clothes and accessories, happy meal toys, random toys that didn’t have a place and didn’t fit into any of the categories - and those things made the ‘trash’ list.
The random things really didn’t add anything to their lives, save for me nagging them to clean them up every weekend, and them complaining about how it’s going to take hours to clean their room.
But I felt kind of guilty.
On one hand, her room is clean, really clean, since I washed the walls, vacuumed and washed her bedding, organizing the entire thing - but on the other hand, I was throwing things in the trash that six year old hoarders might find important. Those happy meal toys that didn’t get picked up off of the floor, those pieces of papers, small notes that she has made, markers without covers and other things.
In the trash, before she got home from school.
Would she miss them? Are these small things important? Strange items that came from places I don’t know about, maybe small toy trades on the bus, ripped up pieces of papers with important plots and treasure maps, valuable?
Do you throw out the random things you find in your kid’s room when it gets to a certain point where it’s full of random stuff? Or, do you let them do the dirty work? If you did, did you feel momentarily guilty?