I swear we must have filled the equivalent of one of these clothing bins -with a combination of useable clothing, plus a few bags we labelled "rags". (I've used a few different bins over the weekend. Call it sharing the love between different charities... )

I did ask one of the charity shops once if they took clothing for rags and they said yes. Funny how you still feel a bit guilty about dumping stained or torn clothes, but I suppose rating clothing wearability isn't a strong point. And "one man's trash is another's treasure" even with clothing I guess - so I suppose they will know what to do with it. (We knew a guy once who was in the 'rag trade'- as he liked to describe it - whereby material was shredded and compressed into uniform-sized rags then sold. So we tend to feel that just about anything must surely be rag-worthy. ) The bigger question is why the hell we had so many basically unwearable items of clothing anyway.

We've also taken a car load of rubbish rubbish to the tip. So yes.. we are a few hundred pounds lighter already, and we're not really even half way.

Our bedroom - our whole storey - looks presentable again. And clean. (If you don't look up into the cobwebs under the steep pitched ceiling that is...) That herculean task was achieved mainly by Marc who did most of the cleaning (I had a shopping trip interruption on Saturday morning - when one's girl has reached the point in her life when she desperately needs proper bras, and there are no other spare weekday afternoons or weekends on the horizon, you've just got to get her to the shops, clean up or no clean up.)

I wish I could say we'd made a similar impact on another floor of the house yesterday and today, but we have mostly been sorting through lots of 'stuff' on shelves, and computer desks, and various baskets and drawers. And throwing out all sorts of stuff that you can't think why you kept, really... Probably thinking it would come in handy one day, only whenever you might have needed it, you wouldn't have known where to find it anyway... Please tell me we are not the only people who accumulate stuff like that.

The vacuum cleaner has been waved around a bit, but there is much that I have to continue on with once everyone is back at school and work. Thus my back has been spared up to this point, but I'm going to have to get stuck in and risk it. I've taken it on myself to do the middle floor (all the kids' stuff) because I couldn't face Marc going ballistic about it all. I really don't think he would cope with all their stuff, nor understand what was valuable to them and what wasn't. As it is, I anticipate a fair bit of swearing by myself in their absence.

Meanwhile, last night I managed to slice a wafer-thin bit of skin off my thumb while chopping up tomatoes for the salad... and it has been one of those stupid inconveniences that you notice all the more when you are trying to clean. Bandaids don't stay on the end of my thumb properly, particularly when I need to keep washing my hands. And then I was using a quick-unpick to unpick some stitches (so as to put new elastic in a pair of kid's shorts) and I stuck it right into the raw skin of the sore bit. Yeeow.

Yesterday afternoon we took a break, and ducked off down to the beach. Autumn it may be, but the water wasn't cold, and the waves were just right for even an amateur like myself to bodysurf. I wish we'd made it back there today, but while I put a roast dinner on, Cait got herself over some sort of hormonal teenage huff (that I basically ran away from and let Marc deal) and suddenly got all keen on helping Marc sort through the mess that was our cd/vcr/dvd collection. They achieved a garbage bag of old video tapes, and a box of kiddy ones to hand down to friends with littlies. It's a bit sad to see those old Wiggles and Hooley Dooley tapes go - another reminder that your kids have gone and grown up on you... But there is really no point hanging on to them. By the time I have grandchildren, VCRs will be well and truly extinct. (As it is, among their number is the first ever Wiggles video, and boy were they unpolished and gawky back then! I wonder if the current generation of Wiggles fans would even recognise them.)

They also managed to reunite nearly all our wandering cds with their empty cases. Bar one, which I hope will turn up somewhere. ("I hope it will turn up" is my favourite mantra)

It'll probably turn up up *there* in the kids' kingdom, and I will wonder what the hell, who on earth put it THERE?

The other big question I have for the weekend is why the hell the Easter Bunny didn't leave ME any chocolate, because I have been salivating over the kids' chocolate all weekend, and using all manner of tactics to get them to share with me.

Labels: clean ups, daily