Live Like No One Else

I love this time of year. Spring cleaning, decluttering, longer days and warmer weather.

Here in West Michigan the warm weather has been slow to come. Our snow was gone about four weeks ago now and I think we have had maybe five days above fifty degrees. Don’t hold me to that, I’m just really ready for seventy-five or eighty degrees. 🙂

Today as I am writing I am sitting outside while my boys are playing. Seth is burying a ball,  “because it is windy”, and Cameron, my little busy body, is crawling from one thing to the next; Eating sticks and throwing rocks. Thankfully, no dirt has gone into his mouth yet.

This year I haven’t been able to do much spring cleaning yet because of my arm, (I broke my elbow while on a training ride in early April, you can read more here.) but I have still been able to declutter. I LOVE decluttering! There is something extremely satisfying in filling a basket, box or bag of things we don’t use, don’t like, don’t need or don’t want and then taking it to Goodwill or our local consignment shop.

Learning to live with less is something that has taken me a few years. Learning to be content with what I have and not constantly seeking more to keep up with the Jones’ has been a struggle. I am a pack rat by nature, but soon after marriage and moving into a small house (approximately five hundred fifty square feet) I realized I couldn’t keep everything. So I started sorting and tossing. It was hard but so needed, because one month after our first wedding anniversary Seth joined our family.

Now we had three people in our little house. And all the stuff that babies “require“.

I learned quickly that babies don’t need all the stuff people say they do. I really wanted that stuff but it couldn’t fit and we survived without it.

Does baby really need  twenty sleepers, a swing, a bouncer, pack and play, crib and fifteen noisy toys that are supposed to boost his IQ by twenty-five percent?

Okay, maybe the twenty sleepers are a good idea for the newborn stage when explosive poo and ninja pee is an issue. And a bed is probably a good idea, but all of that other stuff is stuff.  Baby needs milk, a dry bottom and somewhere warm. All of which can be accomplished with boob, diapers and wipes, and making sure momma has a warm safe place.

Fast-forward three and a half years: We have a bigger house, we added on two rooms and a basement, Cameron joined the family and we have collected more stuff.

Seth and I have been reading Little House on the Prairie before nap time. Mary and Laura have little in the way of possessions but they are happy, smart, healthy girls. They have chores, play outside almost all day and use their imaginations. I know the world was different then and they didn’t have things because they couldn’t afford them, but can we really afford all of our stuff?

Here in the United States of America we are one of the least healthy countries in the world despite all of our “medical knowledge”.
Our children are growing up expecting everything to be handed to them on a silver platter and they do not take responsibility for their actions.
We used to send our kids outside and now they sit in front of the TV, computer or X-box.
We are in debt up to the heavens and no one wants to cut spending.

I have been reading The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey this past month and learning a lot. One of my favorite phrases from the book is this: Learn to live like no one else now, so that you live like no one else later.

If I have extra clothes hanging in my closet I should get rid of them. If I have cookbooks I never use I should sell them. If there are toys that the boys don’t play with often we should get give them to someone else or send them to a consignment shop. If there are things laying around the house that don’t seem to have a home I need to evaluate why they don’t have a home and decide whether we actually NEED them or not.

Learning to live with less makes it so much easier to keep our house clean. We have been whittling our boys’ toy collection down since Christmas. Keeping only what they actually play with and those special keepsake toys. If Seth complains about having to pick up them we talk about taking care of what we have; if he can dump it out he can pick it up and if he can’t keep his toys picked up when he isn’t playing with them than he probably has too many.

I recently read this article on Keeper of the Home, one of my favorite blogs. It talks about raising our kids with less stuff. Instead of focusing on stuff in life, we can focus on living our life to the fullest, focusing on relationships and loving others with all we are.