40 Bag Challenge Update #2

It's time for another progress report on my 40 Bag Challenge. This week we continued working on cleaning out the boys' rooms, and started sorting through mine and hubby's clothing. We ended up with this addition to our donation pile:

Although my boys have an easy time sorting through their stuff and getting rid of items they have outgrown, for me it can be quite an emotional process to watch them discard items that were once much-loved and remind me of particular periods in their childhood. As I watch the last remnants of "little boyhood" exiting my house, I am reminded of just how fast my boys have grown and that the days when I will have someone climbing on my lap to snuggle up for a story or three are long gone. ::Sigh:: I suspect this a hard time for most mamas out there! Of course it is a lot of fun to have 12 and 14 year old boys, too (although I've only seen them for approximately 32 seconds today as it's March Break and they had a sleepover at their friend's house last night, rushed in to drop off their stuff, then promptly departed for the park.)

Whoops...got off on a bit of a tangent there :) I told you decluttering had a tendency to make me all wishy-washy!

My big success this week was unburying my desk, which looked like this:

Yes, more than a little embarrassing. While I don't have too much of a problem keeping the rest of the house fairly neat, my office is usually somewhat of a disaster. Paper clutter seems to be my nemesis! I'm not too sure why this is. I have a great system for organizing my bills, and they are filed as soon as I open them. Junk mail goes straight in the recycling bin. So what *is* all that stuff? A lot of it is related to my creative process - notes on blog articles I might want to write, recipes I want to make, interesting information related to local issues that I don't want to forget about. Yes, I know I should just file all this stuff - but my brain seems to work on an "if I can't see it, it doesn't exist" sort of basis. If you think it looks bad now, you should have seen it while I was in the thick of writing my book :)

Despite my previous failures with various filing systems, I've decided to give it another shot. After I was done sorting, tossing and filing, I was pleased with the results:

Hey, there *was* a desk under there after all! I am hoping I can keep it looking a lot closer to this than to the "before" picture - fingers crossed.


I think that puts me up to 10 bags/boxes of "stuff" that have been removed from our house so far. I may not make it up to 40 by the end of Lent, but I'm ecstatic to have cleared this much clutter in such a relatively short period of time.

If you've joined me in this challenge, how are you doing so far?