Since becoming a mother my dreams have changed. Where once I dreamed of shopping in Paris, or lounging on a beach in Bora Bora, I now dream about eating a meal sitting down, and throwing away all of my kids toys.
I can picture myself skipping through the house with a big black garbage bag and just filling it up. No more clutter, no more toy soup, just no more stuff. This is the dream I want to stay in forever, but one of my tiny people always pulls me out of bed because they need breakfast. Stumbling to the kitchen, I step on a Lego and sob. The toys are still here, and I realize it was all just a beautiful dream.
But, it doesn’t have to be. One mom actually made the dream happen and now she is a hero to me and moms everywhere.
The woman, the mother, the legend is Allie Casazza of Bentonville, Arkansas. Once an overwhelmed mother of four just trying to make it through a day, Casazza now helps other moms achieve freedom and happiness by cutting the clutter.
I heart my herd. ❤️
A photo posted by Allie Casazza (@allie_thatsme) on
Jul 31, 2016 at 9:45am PDT
She describes her aha moment on her website, The Purposeful Housewife.
“I went into the playroom—the room that was the bane of my existence. This was a room full of colorful bins, each bin full of toys. There were toys on the floor, in chests, in boxes, toys everywhere. I would send my kids in here to play and they would come out less than ten minutes later complaining of boredom. This room was pointless, and I’d had enough,” she says.
But, rather than just kicking the can down the road and grinding out another day, Casazza got to work.
“I started working through the room, making piles—keep, trash, donate. I got rid of every single toy that I felt wasn’t benefitting my kids. If it didn’t cause them to engage in constructive or imaginary play, it wasn’t staying in this house because it wasn’t worth the work it caused me. If I was going to clean up it was going to be the things that added to our lives; it was going to be only the things we needed and the things we truly loved,” she says.
When it was all said and done, she saved her kids’ trains and tracks, some dress-up costumes, books and blocks—the rest went to Goodwill.
See that bin? That holds every toy my kids have, except Legos, and it's only about halfway full. This isn't to show how hardcore we are or to say that you have to do this to experience the fullness of a life lived intentionally with less stuff, but only to say that kids are naturally happy little creatures. They're made to imagine, play, explore, and create. If you remove everything they've been told to stay entertained with, they will complain for a few days, but pretty soon their God-given imaginations will breathe a deep sigh and be brought to life again. They'll discover the beauty in making up stories and acting them out together, of finding bugs and naming them Hubert (Bella's grasshopper), and of forming a strong bond uninterrupted by noisy toys that do all the playing for them. It's a beautiful exchange- junk for life. I'm never going back and I'll spend my life spreading this message. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2/72x72/1f495.png" alt="