Today I headed back into the master bedroom. I don’t know about your house, but in ours laundry baskets are multi-functional, serving as both devices to transport laundry and as containers for our crap.

This is what the one I took care of today looked like:

Um, yeah. It was so heavy, it took both of my kids to carry it and put it on the dining room table. And by so heavy, I mean more than my 10 pound lifting restriction.

Most of it ended up in the donate closet, the bag for textile recycling or the curbside recycling bin. I’d conservatively estimate about 5% went to the trash. It was probably less. *cracks whip*

The portion of it that belonged to the kids was decluttered by them. Most of it went to the donate closet. One Wii game was rediscovered. OhdearGodthankyou. We are hobbling through the end of the summer. They are bored and I’m losing my mind. So, yay for decluttering! (Jen Hatmaker describes the end of summer with kids way better than I could. Plus, hilarious.)

Unfortunately for my ability to throw it in his face me, Stephen had nothing in there. Nothing. *hides behind self-righteous finger pointing*

This is what was left after the kids stuff was taken care of, one magazine was put in the box with the other publications in which I authored articles, two cords were put in the box with the other cords (to be dealt with later) and a bottle of finger nail polish was returned to the bathroom.

On the right is a stack of expired Groupons. By the way, you can use expired Groupons for the amount you paid for them. And, if the vendor doesn’t accept them, Groupon is awesome about giving you a credit.

And, there’s the book Cleaning House: A Mom’s Twelve-Month Experiment to Rid Her House of Youth Entitlement by Kay Wyma. (Not an affiliate link.) I thought it was a pretty good experiment in teaching her kids basic life skills and how to perform the tasks required in managing a household. (In the interest of full disclosure, there are some Bible references in there, but I don’t remember it as being overly preachy.)

I was particularly interested in this concept since we have the whole housekeeping issue. We’re doing pretty well around here on that front, which is the subject of another post entirely.

I’m done reading this book, so if you’re interested in my copy, let me know in the comments. I’ll be happy to hook one of you up (since I only have one copy). If there’s more than one person interested, I’ll figure out how to use one of those random selection things or let my kids draw a name out of a hat.

Happy Wednesday!