My Journey of Hope: The De-Cluttering Continues!

I was at the dollar store with Secunda today, picking up flower pots for a fairy garden workshop we were doing later in the evening. While there, I had the lovely idea of finding a method of better organizing the bathroom drawer that Tertius and Quarta share. Up until now, the only measure I'd taken to tame the chaos in the drawer was to put a narrow plastic tray in there to contain the toothbrushes and toothpaste, which had become woefully inadequate. It seemed that the toothbrushes were breeding (another area that my children hoard items), the most recent trip to the dentist had yielded two new mini-tubes of paste, and the whole drawer was well past due for an overhaul.



So, we wandered over to the "we have a basket/tray/holder for everything" aisle, and I picked up two rectangular trays for $1.25, and three narrow rectangular trays for another $1.25. When the little hobbitses were preparing for bedtime, I grabbed the trays, hauled everything out of the drawer, and with Quarta's help, organized and culled the whole thing in under 5 minutes. In fact, it was done so quickly, and so effortlessly, that I only realized after the fact that I should have taken a "before" picture!

While I lack a "before" photo, here is the "after" photo:

A small thing, but what a big impact!

Tertius had four superfluous toothbrushes to get rid of, and Quarta had three extras. That's SEVEN unused toothbrushes we released. The funny thing was, both kids, independent of each other, came to me and asked why we had to throw them out; couldn't we give them away to someone who needed a toothbrush? I gently explained (and by gently, I mean that I made gross faces and retching sounds while explaining to them) why this was not a Good Idea™.

In retrospect, it is very heartening to me to see how totally Quarta has jumped onto the de-cluttering bandwagon. Tertius is happy to have a clean, organized drawer, but doesn't much care if he's involved in making it that way. In fact, I think he'd just prefer not to. Ever. But that's another blog post :)