How Many is "Too Many?"

We live in an age of excessive-ness. In this country, most of us have too many pounds on our bodies, too many credit cards in our purses and too many activities to fill our days. We work so hard to pay off our credit cards that we have no time to plan and execute family meals so we go by sonic and charge fast food for our family...adding to our debt and our pounds and giving us only a few extra moments before we dash off to the next important activity in our lives.

Even before this sentiment became true about the majority of people in the USA, I used to tell everyone our house was a study in excess. We had too many kids, way too many dogs, too much debt and too much clutter. Once when the kids were little, I sat looking at the work they had produced at school that month and I "did the math". Lets see.....4 kids times 3 years of pre-school, 1 year of kindergarten, 5 years of elementary, 3 years of middle and 4 years of high school. One box of stuff per year = 64 bankers boxes of childhood momentos....

It was at that moment I started shoving their work in bags and hiding them in remote corners of the house. I could not bear the thought of throwing away a single coloring page that one of my angels brought home to mommy. I figured I would deal with it later....and certainly there would be a way to cut down the number of bankers boxes full of doodles I was on a head-long collision course with!

Time marches on and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew all those bags were somewhere but I was not sure exactly where. I came across one the other day...in the bottom of my front hall closet. Nothing can prepare us for getting older. Our mother's try to tell us...but what do they know? When my brood were babies...I knew I would never forget one single thing about those years. People told me "LABEL things...write a journal....you will forget". "Not I" I smugly thought...."I am super-mom and I will forget nothing". At that point, one thing I did not realize was that children turn your brains to mush. So here I was, sitting on the floor in the hall outside that closet looking at a variety of pictures, notes, poem pockets, coloring pages and art projects....and if my sweet, perfect angels had not put their names on each piece.....I had no clue who created it. My brain could not even begin to stretch that far back and to that detail. So I guess time has a way of thinning things out. Many precious pieces were thrown out that day because I did not know whose box to add them to.

I have nearly finished my bathroom and the living /dining room is done except the box in the corner by the table. I have piles in places I stopped seeing a long time ago, but with every trip to the dump....the way becomes clearer.

So now the ultimate sentimental messies question, again, how many is too many? I came across a pile of commencement programs from my baby's graduation from High School this past May. There were 11 family members in attendance ( not including my perfect sleeping grandson). Each of us had 2 programs for good measure, so now I have 22 commencement programs. Is that too many? I mean, what happens if I lose or wrinkle one .....?

BTW, in case you were wondering. I still say the house is a study in excess but the one thing I used to laughingly say..."We have too many kids...." is so not true....We had the perfect number of kids and even with alll the clutter they add to the mess...I would not change that part of my life for every de-cluttered house in the world!