6,500 things gone, only 3,500 to go

As I get further into my project, it’s getting more difficult to find things that are “easy” to get rid of.

Last night, I wandered from room to room looking for a shelf or bin to empty until I finally convinced myself, once again, to just start picking things up already! I started in the kids bathroom and got as far as my office where I found a gold mine of tossers hidden in my storage cabinet.

I took a few detailed pictures to give you an idea of what 100 things actually looks like.

Good-bye green lightbulb! Good-bye waving bumblebee!

Does anyone see a theme here?

Educational toys!

I guess it’s easier to buy a new toy than to deal with the possibility that your child may have a learning style no one has actually invented yet. I have every educational product that money can buy and a few I stole straight out of the hands of literacy researchers. In the end, it wasn’t a product that helped our son, but one (lovely) living, breathing, Orton-Gillingham tutor.

It’s common knowledge amongst marketers that parents are a vulnerable group of consumers:

As a group parents are definitely vulnerable to marketing strategies…the same way “people are vulnerable when someone dies” and they are preyed upon by the funeral industry…

It was a bitter sweet farewell to this stuff that once held so much promise for my son’s future, but it also marks the end of our trial and error days which is a huge relief, and the end of my magical thinking phase in which I briefly believed that all my problems could be solved by an electronic frog.

What I Tossed Today: I didn’t toss anything. Squirrel went through his old photos while I was writing this and quietly got rid of more than 100 of them. Shhhh!