We have spent the weekend (yet again) organizing in the house. I cannot believe how much we have hauled out of here. I've filled 2.5 large kitchen garbage bags full of boy's clothes from size 2T to size 4/5 and am offering that up on freecycle. I've filled another same size bag with my daughter's outgrown clothes (sent one off with grandpa last week) for her older, shorter cousin, and managed to fill half another one with little girl toddler clothes. My daughter is 10.5, I thought the girly toddler clothes were long since gone.

I've also got several fancy recital costumes from her dance days and 5 or 6 really pretty leotards in the age 3 to 7 sizes, that I think I will put up on e-bay. I will probably wait until August when people are gearing up for dance classes that start in the fall.

We filled the recycle bin with newspaper and could probably do it again. Usually we burn newspaper, but I've rolled as many paper logs as will fit in the firewood box and folded as many sheets into kindling as will fit in the kindling box.

We've gone through all the old magazines, too. I've filled two crates with old magazines. Out went Reader's Digests, Woman's Day, Family Circle, any gardening magazine that wasn't Fine Gardening, and a lot of the cooking magazines. I kept Fine Cooking and tore out recipes from the other mags that I will input into my cooking database.

I'm still wading through laundry, but instead of it being up to my knees its down at a much more manageable ankle depth. I'm only half kidding. But I am folding and putting away, or hanging up, or putting into give away bags, stuff as each load comes out of the dryer.

Dishes are one load from being caught up. My daughter, who isn't supposed to eat in her room, had at least a load's worth of dishes under her bed. Fortunately it was nothing that was growing any strange creatures in them. Mostly glasses and bowls.

I still have a pile of documents to shred that will probably fill a paper grocery bag if I pack it tight. We also filled a paper grocery bag of regular paper for recycle, mostly envelopes of the stuff we have to shred still.

I never realized how much junk there is in this house. It doesn't look like its as bad as I've described, but a lot of stuff was shoved in closets. We've done spring cleaning before, but never this deeply or thoroughly. The house is still a bit chaotic but that improves with each box we move to storage.

I need to put up a set of Encyclopedias on freecycle, too. My sister managed to bamboozle my husband into taking her old set when they moved. I had already told her twice that we didn't want them, but J being who she is, can be quite determined to get her way. She didn't want to move them or pay for them to be in her storage space. DH brought them home not knowing I had told her no twice. Since we already had two sets of encyclopedias, he shouldn't have even thought we needed any.

Admittedly one set is used to hold up a shelf in T's room and only one set is available to look stuff up in, unless someone wants to balance the shelf while something gets looked up, but its not like that is hard. Anyway, the third set has been sitting around taking up valuable book shelf space, so out it is going to go.

It still seems like there is a world of stuff to do in this house, but I am seeing improvement now instead of total chaos. You know how it always seems you have to make a bigger mess than you started with to clean? Well, we seem to be past that stage now.

All right, I guess that is enough work avoidance. The laundry is calling my name, and then the shredder.