Bag week

This week's projects involved the many bags of stuff in my life.  I sorted through one bag each day, usually taking less than 15 minutes.

The first was Lincoln's diaper bag.  He has reached the point where it is time to downsize from the big black bag to a smaller, boyish drawstring bag.  Half the time I don't even grab it when I leave the house.  It's mostly just for leaving with him in nursery or other childcare situations.

The next two days were dedicated to unpacking the park and swimming bags.  This summer I had put together separate bags for the park and the pool, each of which contained diaper changing supplies and just about anything I'd possibly need for either activity down to an extra pair of contacts in the swim bag.  This was very handy when we made last minute decisions to go do something.  I didn't have run around for 10 minutes trying to think of everything I should bring.  I just grabbed a bag and headed out the door.  But now that park and pool season is over they were just taking up unnecessary space in the closet.  I put away most of the contents and stored the bags in the attic for next summer.

One day was not exactly a bag, but close enough.  It was my stationery box containing writing paper, blank thank you notes, birthday cards, addresses, etc.  I cleaned out lots of out-dated and mismatched stuff and ended up giving a large stack of unused envelopes of all shapes and sizes to Emily.  She has had a lot of fun playing with them.  She likes to write "emails" to her preschool friends. :o)

Last, but not least, was my bowling bag of a purse.  I think it kind of looks like a bowling ball bag and feels almost as heavy sometimes!  I have purposely been using a larger one to carry stuff for Lincoln so I don't always have to have a diaper bag, too.  But his needs are decreasing, and it was time for a good cleaning-out.  I'm not sure in what form it started out, but the cookie/cracker dust was pretty deep in the bottom.  The most surprising thing I found was a paint can opener.  Not sure why that was in there.  I also found a total of six ink pens, which is funny since I can hardly ever seem to find one when I need it to cross things off my grocery list in the store.  I tried downsizing back to an older, smaller purse, but it didn't have the number and size of pockets I like to have for certain items.  So I'm keeping the big one for now with enough room to spare to pack an entire lunch. ;o)  I did manage to reduce the overall weight of the purse by 22% by declutterung it.  Leave me a comment to guess how much you think my purse weighed when I started and I'll announce the closest guess.  Note: At the time of the weigh-in my purse did not contain any water bottles or sippy cups, which it often does.