Clutter

I'm not an overly materialistic person.  I don't have expensive furnishings around the house.  All of my furniture is second hand or hand me down.  I even stopped buying books after my oldest daughter was born and I realized that I feed my book addiction for free at the library.  But I do have a hard core inability to say no when people try to give me stuff, and I have three children who are incredible pack rats.  Although calling Julie a packrat at this point does seem unfair.  So just the two children who are hoarders.

And my place is LITTLE.  Living room/dining room/kitchen and three bedrooms.  So it's not ridiculously little, but it feels that way because it's crowded and cluttered and all the time messy.  Because there's no storage or playroom.  I clean it constantly, so it's not dirty, the floors are done, laundry washed, dishes done, etc - but there are always toys and books and dishes cluttered all over the place.

I'm in the middle of putting away groceries, rearranging Jessie's room, rearranging the dining room and  wondering if I should rearrange the living room.  I'm feeling VERY overwhelmed and choosing to blog instead of finishing one of these projects.  Which is self-defeating, I know that, but still... here we are.

I'm wondering what to do with the clutter.  The kids are gone during the day - should I just gradually get rid of their stuff when they aren't looking?  I don't know they'd notice, they're not really into stuff either - they just hate getting rid of it.  For example, I've got one of those big plastic toy buckets, I bet I could get rid of the whole thing and they'd never notice.  And books - I think I went a little overboard on books.  I'm a reader, I love to read.  But while I'm much better about not getting books for me and just going to the library, I've obviously just switched to now getting books for KIDS and having them all over the place.  I get away with it because they're all hand me down books - people love to pass on their books, and I never say no.  I can't get rid of books, right?  I mean, that would be ridiculous.  What kind of mother gets rid of books???  But there's a nagging voice inside me that says that there's about thirty times more books than my kids actually want to read - perhaps cutting down would be a good move?

Okay, maybe I'm a hoarder too.  Because the thought of getting rid of books makes me itchy.  But there's too much STUFF here.