The Aftermath

It has been about 8 hours since I last posted. In those very loooong eight (plus the time before I posted) hours of my Spring Fling, I have learned several new things. Here is a list, in no particular order, of then ten things I have learned since this morning:

1. We have monumental amounts of crap.
2. DH has so many magazines, that if he were to start today and read one magazine a day, cover to cover, I would still have to bury him with several hundred more so he could catch up in heaven.
3. Fer' cripes sake, he owns a book called "Disused Stations of the London Underground." I'm not shitting you, he really does. Not only that, he thinks this topic would be fascinating. (I know, because I spoke to him in New Zealand and he happily admitted this. *shudder*)
   
4. The kids will ignore various broken toys for literally months on end - in fact, completely forget about them. Until, of course, the day you get your roundtoit and they suddenly HAVE to have that one tiny plastic pink scrap of crap. RIGHT NOW.
5. Somewhere in the world there are hundreds of Barbie dolls who only have one shoe.
6. When we got engaged and then married, we had one party in the US, and one in Australia. (So that's 4 events all up.) I thought that was cool - double the stuff! I was so very, very wrong. All it means is, nine years later, you have a house full of crap. Man oh man, do we own some mo-fo-bugly vases. And I have nowhere to store them, and they're so bad I'm too embarassed to give them away or re-gift them.
   
7. A recycling bin ...can only hold so many random scraps of paper before it starts to protest and hold industrial action meetings about being overworked and underpaid.
8. There is so much stuff which "magically disappeared" today - and yet it appears I have made not a dent. *sigh* Will it never end?
   
9. Considering how long it took to do just the downstairs (and I was even motivated by Billy Joel's Greatest Hits Vol III) - truly, the only humane, decent, moral thing to do would be to torch the office. Immediately.
   
10. The amount of time it takes to de-clutter the family home is approximately 1,850 times SLOWER than it takes three kids to clutter it all up again. I timed it. From the time their feet hit the front door step to the time it was cluttered again: 2 minutes, 23 seconds.

So there you have it. I still have the upstairs to do, and have set aside an entire day to do that in. God help me. I also learned one more, not spring cleaning related thing today:

A kernel of corn on the end of a toothpick makes:

1. A really good microphone for singing (at dinner).
2. A really good stop sign, for driving around lamb bone cars (at dinner).
3. Add a kernel on the other end and it makes a barbell, for pretending to be the circus strong man (at dinner.)
4. A limbo bar, for the limbo game which lamb bones like to play (at dinner).
   

Therefore, I also learned:

1. Best to let the kids have access to toothpicks...AFTER dinner.