What happened? What changed this happy moment? Nothing changed at first, but we moved four times in 9 months. Initially, the bulk of our stuff was sent out to Bogota, Colombia and we lived in a 2 bedroom 700 square foot apartment for 3 months in Washington DC while we waited for to be sent to our next adventure. It was tight with 2 kids, a newborn, and now my husband to boot. But this wasn’t the culprit. We spent a lot of time at the playground, at the library, and at the bowling alley. We visited museums in D.C and family in Maryland. Then we moved to temporary quarters in Bogota, Colombia where we lived out of suitcases for a month. Still, this was no biggie. Then we moved to our new home and my husband suggested that I let the packers unpack us. I had never done this before, but with a 5 month old strapped to my chest, I figured it might be good to try something new.
Big mistake. They unpacked everything all at once. When I say everything, I mean everything. I found stamps from my stamp collection removed from the wax paper envelope they were stored in. I had purchased quite a bit of entertaining dinnerware and every piece was unpacked, but then scattered around three rooms rather than left together matching their pattern. It was a nightmare and one mistake I will never repeat! A lesson horribly learned well. All my art paper was unpacked from their original packages, but instead of being stacked in one room, for some reason I found them all over the house. I spent 4 months getting the house in order and felt like it would never end. I tried to live life at the same time, but I felt like I could never truly relax until it was done. Instead of keeping to making sure that we pared down on stuff, I found we were receiving quite often. I was shocked by the amount of bins filled with toys. I couldn’t figure out where to put it all in spite of the fact our home was over 2600 square feet. Also, as I unpacked our stuff from the states, I was receiving items as well. In a way, this was a blessing as we didn’t get many things from Bogota as items are much more expensive. Still, with new things coming in and old things not going out, it can quickly accumulate. Finally, in December, I felt like I could say I had finished. One month later we found that we were moving again. Mid February we moved to our current house. I allowed the packers to pack, with supervision that they didn’t mix rooms, but I refused their generosity when they offered to unpack.
Four months later, I was almost finished unpacking. I took a month off while I was in the states visiting my family and broke the rule, hauling many goods back with me. I had become greedy and forgotten all the previous minimalist rules that made my life so much easier. When I returned, I realized that not only had my greediest caused our house to become slightly overrun with toys, I was wasting my valuable time picking them up. I could be spending that time with my family, but instead, every weekend I spent picking up…over and over again. It was like a replay of my past life.
Here in Bogota material things are very expensive, but help is quite cheap. I had hired a wonderful woman to help me with my daily household chores and as I was quickly turning spoiled, I also realized that by not being “hands-on” with our stuff, I had lost connection with what and how much we had. I had read about families struggling with excess amounts of stuff and why they wanted to have less, but I found that most blogs and books that I read didn’t tell me how to decided what to keep and what to toss. Fortunately, I found it a lot easier to get rid of toys as there were many needy children living in Bogota. There’s a different between needy children in the United States and needy children in Colombia. Sure, we’ve all read about it and seen news reports, but it’s nothing like seeing children working the streets in dirty clothes. At Christmas, the Catholic Church that I was attending, asked that each child give Santa, who had happened to come visit us during our potluck, a present for a Colombian child. We gave three small boxes and then I secretly gave an additional four small ones. I didn’t want the other families to see because I felt slightly embarrassed that we had so many boxes, but I really wanted those children to have toys to play with. I was happy to think of the toys actually being played by the children (hopefully) and wondered if the parents weren’t cursing me for now littering the floor of their hut! Maybe their children would respect their toys and not scatter them all over for someone to step on and break. Or maybe it’s universal, no matter how rich or poor a child is, to scatter toys everywhere.
(next post talks about HOW to become a minimalist with children, really!)
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