One Less: Box of Baby Clothes

I pulled out all of our stored clothes in sizes 0000 through to 4.  

There were a lot of clothes.  About 8 boxes in total.  I counted 35 shirts in size 1, and ten of those had long sleeves.  I live in the tropics!

I don't need to keep it all.  The Big Boy has always had too many clothes, and I have been quite happy with the smaller rotation of clothes The Small Boy has had:  5 or 6 t-shirts and 5 or 6 singlets/vests and 4 or 5 pairs of shorts (he wears just a nappy without shorts around home).  During the cooler months he has also had 2 long sleeved t-shirts, 2 long pants, 2 jumpers and 4 growsuits for bed.    I found as The Big Boy got older he wore singlets less often and t-shirts most of the time, and I anticipate The Small Boy will do the same.

I decided to keep in each size:

- no more than 8-10 shirts
- no more than 5 or 6 pairs of shorts
- no more than 3 long pants
- no more than 3 long sleeved shirts
- no more than 3 jumpers

I kept an extra pair of winter clothes because the toddler years are just that bit messier than the baby years, in my experience.  

The remainder of the items were divided into two piles.  Things I didn't really want to keep because it was used but I wasn't enamoured with it have gone to a charity shop.  Things that still had price tags on (mostly gifts, some stuff that I had bought and put away then not needed) has been listed as bulk lots in each size on Ebay.  A few brand new things I kept because they were given to The Small Boy as gifts and I quite like them.

I managed to get all the clothes down to 5 1/2 boxes, and there is still room for the Size 0 (which the Small Boy is in now) clothes to go into in the next month or two.  

One Less: Ornamental Spoon

Someone I once knew did woodwork as a hobby, and as a thank you for something I did for him, he gave me a hand-carved wooden spoon.

It looked beautiful, so I put it on display.

After ten years or so, while I was decluttering ornaments and trinkets, I realised it looked kind of ridiculous and cluttery being on display like that and put it in my utensils draw, and now it's my favourite spoon for cooking.

One Less: stack of empty pots

Today we cleaned out the shed.

I've put off cleaning out the shed, partly because it's full of geckos and who knows what else, partly because the stuff in there represents so much time and money invested in me thinking I could be another Peter Cundall or Jackie French.  

Piles of empty pots ready to propagate in.  Bags of fertilisers and bottles of organic pesticides to treat this deficiency or eradicate that pest.  Seeds past their plant-by-date.  Shovels, trowels, rakes, gloves, hose connector doodads.

It all goes with the pile of barely read gardening tomes inside.

So much money spent, so little return.  Rotting.

I thought that I wanted to be a gardener, but it turns out I just like gardens.  All I need is an easy care yard, with the occasional spectacular flower (there are some of these sprung up at the moment that I'd forgotten about), a little vegetable patch, and a fruit tree or two.  I don't actually want to be spending hours potting around the garden: there are too many fantastic books to read, and I have too many children to play with!

One Less: Box of Papers

Once upon a time I used to be a music teacher.  I trained to teach secondary school Music and English, but ended up teaching Music from preschool through to year ten, and middle school English and SOSE (history/geography/civics).   When I left teaching seven years ago it was fairly abruptly, and at the time I didn't know if it would be for one year, two years, ten years, or forever. So I just packed everything I had into five boxes and put them into storage.  As it turned out, I had a baby before I had opportunity to take up another teaching job.

Two years ago I did the sums and worked out that if I did teach again I would have been out of it for ten years, probably twelve.   There are already new syllabuses in place for the subjects I taught, and will be yet another new one by the time I return to work.  My resources will mostly be so out of date that I won't be using them anyway.

So I sat down with my five boxes and culled.  I threw out class sets of worksheets that I never used.  I threw out bits and pieces of English resources that I had collected but never taught a full unit on.  I threw out doubles of assignment task sheets and extra copies of exams.   I managed to pare it down by half.

Today, the Small Boy wanted to play out in the garage where the boxes are stored, so I set to work culling again.  It felt rather momentous because I looked at my materials in the box mentally marked 'music' and realised that I would probably never teach Senior (year 11 and 12) Music.  I never taught it when I was working, and don't really want to teach Music if I do teach again.  The bits and pieces of materials for teaching Senior Music that I was saving in my box are worthless now and will be even more worthless if I were to return to teaching.  So I threw them out.  I also pared back all of my P-10 resources so that I have just the bare bones.  I stuffed one display folder with unit plan overviews that I can build from again if I ever need to.  My 2 1/2 boxes is now down to 1 2/3.  When I next get a chance, the box mentally marked 'English/SOSE' may not be safe!

I'm not willing to part with all my teaching materials just yet.  I will possibly teach part time one day in the future, and don't want to have to start everything from scratch.  Until I can say definitively I will not be teaching ever again, I don't think it is wise to part with it all, but I do want to pare down to just enough to get me started if I need it.

But, as an added bonus, my husband (who is a primary school teacher) looked at his six boxes of resources and starting culling, too.  He's barely looked in those boxes in five years and knows a lot of what he owns is also out of date.

A New Paradigm

I've decided to put my money where my mouth is.  I've already changed my buying habits to be more conscious of how much I buy, now I want to become more conscious about what I am buying.

I am concerned for the wastefulness of our society's insatiable desire for stuff, and the effects that it has on the environment.   I am also concerned for the people who make my stuff, those who are being paid pittance to make my stuff so that I can have them so cheap, and those whose homelands are being being poisoned in the process.  I want to show love for my neighbour, and I believe that I am currently showing contempt because those who produce my stuff are invisible to me.

I'm starting with clothes and footwear, but also considering homewares, stationery, food and whatever else comes into my house.  I am willing to concede that my laptop and mobile phone probably won't meet my new standard.  

New things must be one or more of the following:

• handmade
• made in Australia (to ensure it hasn't travelled too far to reach me)
• made from recycled products
• organic and/or fair trade
• secondhand 
• durable and reusable

It will probably cost me more, but maybe it won't.  If I pay $30 for a t-shirt and it lasts a year, that's actually better than paying $8 for a t-shirt that lasts for three months. 

One Less: Washing Trolley

A few months ago our washing trolley lost a wheel, then another.    I don't actually use the trolley for pushing the basket back and forth from the laundry, and I tend to walk back and forth from the basket to the line anyway.  If I was honest, I would say I had a washing trolley because everyone needs a washing trolley.

I had just been using the trolley as a stand for the basket until we had to clear everything from the backyard before Cyclone Yasi in February.  Since then I have just put the basket on the ground and the basket of pegs hangs off the line. It's working surprisingly well.

My husband keeps saying just go out and buy a new one.  I was happy to make do without one until we had spare cash.  But now I've decided I'm just not going to bother.  I don't really need it.

One Less: Box of Staples

You know, I don't really need 10000 staples, six pairs of scissors, six sharpeners, 10 Post-it note pads, 5 liquid paper pens, 20 bulldog clips, 8 erasers, or 4 rulers, especially not when most of those have been sitting in a box, unused, on my shelf for 4, 6, 8, 10 years.

Stationery downsized from two boxes to one.  Excess stationery going to my sister who is 1/6 of the way through a business degree, so will probably benefit from it more than me.  Broken and no-longer working stuff: binned.  Remaining items in the box are on borrowed time.  I think we can drop to a box 1/3 of the size.

What was I thinking buying that many staples in the first place?

One less: outdated clothes

I pulled out all my folded clothes, threw them on the bed and sorted them into piles according to style.   Should I confess right now that I found unworn clothing, still with tags?  And I have multiples of the same colour.

I decided now was the time to part with my graduation outfit from when I finished high school.  Yes, yes, it was only 13 1/2 years ago, but I figured that I'm never actually going to fit it again, seeing as I don't even intend on being my grade 12 size again, and after two babies I'm just generally bigger.  Besides, I cannot actually picture an occasion to which I would wear a black and gold lace halter top.

It was also the time to part with a few tired clothes that I've kept to just wear around the house - how many do I really need! - and the parachute silk pants with the broken zip that I've kept in case we do another trip to the snow.  Also gone are the jeans that never really fit properly.  Winter only lasts a few weeks here: here's to not spending those weeks in uncomfortable pants!

I am hanging on to things in multiple sizes. Shock, horror, gasp! A big minimalist no-no, I know, but my breastfeeding size is a little bigger than my ordinary size, and I'm actively trying to lose the extra kilos I found in between babies.  It's not actually multiple sizes, it's two different sizes to accommodate my body's not-finished-having-babies-yet flux in size and shape.   I promise that when I'm done all the too big stuff will go!

One less: shirt

I have one less shirt in my wardrobe today, and one less pair of shoes.   Neither of them I actually wanted to get rid of, but the shirt had been eaten by something and was riddle with holes, and the heel broke off my boots.

It was a favourite shirt.  So soft, so comfortable.  If it was such a favourite, how did it get eaten, I hear you ask?  It had 3/4 length sleeves and was made from pure wool.  I live in the tropics, and the weather here is only mild enough to wear things with such sleeves for a few weeks a year.  Those few weeks last year I was wearing maternity clothing, so the shirt has been in amongst a pile of clothes for nearly two years.

To be honest, I have too many shirts with sleeves.  I kept buying them because I really like that style and they were on the clearance rack.  I just kept buying shirts because I liked them, and now I have more 'winter clothes' than I can wear each winter.  Now, to choose which ones to let go....

The boots I let go of broke today.  I'd bought them on ebay for 99c.  Living where I do, I couldn't justify $99 for a pair of boots that I would only wear a few times a year.  I had them for two or three years, and the soles fell apart completely today, and I had to put them in the bin.   The problem with this is that I now have one less pair of shoes that I can wear socks with which means I need to stop putting off clearing out my sock drawer.  I am pretty sure I have more pairs of socks than we have days of winter, and I wear open shoes on most of the non-winter days.

I need to clean out the bottom of my wardrobe, too. It kind of vomited when I went looking for a shirt when winter arrived suddenly this week.  I'm hoping to have plenty to give away by the time I'm done.

One Less Pile of Papers

I had a subscription to Gardening Australia magazine for three years, and occasionally buy Better Homes and Gardens magazine.  After I'd read each issue I'd tear out all the 'useful' pages and put them in a folder.  This afternoon I went through the whole lot and threw out three quarters of the pages.

The problem with magazine articles is that they only provide limited information: they mostly contain nice pictures.  The problem with gardening information is that I live in the tropics, but the bulk of the Australian population doesn't.  Sydney and Melbourne are far from tropical - more mediterranean and temperate climates - so much of the information about what to plant when is irrelevant to me.  Crikey, if I waited until Melbourne Cup Day (first Tuesday of November) to plant my tomatoes I would never have tomatoes: they are a winter crop up this way.

I've just kept a small pile of 'ideas' for if we want to do some renovating, or decorating.  Just a few things.  I threw out a lot that I didn't like anymore, so I'm okay with keeping a few things if I'm willing to sort through them every so often.


***

I bought a new handbag yesterday from the World Vision shop.  It's handmade by a lady in Ghana, and is small, light, and has a couple of pockets for my bits and pieces - like a spare nappy, and a comb.   When I need to take extra stuff, I'll take an extra bag.  I'll attempt to sell my oversized bag.

One Less Belt

Last week I had six belts.   So I got rid of the three that don't fit around my post-childbirth waist.   Two of them are on borrowed time and will need to prove their worthiness to me.   The other one is a nice brown leather belt that I wear regularly.  


 

One Less Bowl

I had a bowl in my kitchen that contained a collection of rubber bands and the twist ties that come on our loaves of bread. And some marbles. No idea where the marbles came from!

We buy more bread than we use twist ties.  I know I use them, but I can't think what for, so I kept ten and a few rubber bands.

The rest went in the bin, and I'll check that my husband doesn't have any sentimental attachment the bowl before I give it away.

One less thing on my kitchen bench.