My Real Life

I’m a purger by nature.

Purger of clutter, no need to worry for my health.

I toss or give away almost anything that isn’t tied down around here.

I guess you could say I’m a minimalist, which is sometimes a struggle due to the fact that I have 3 children, and children seem to have their own gravitational pull for clutter.

So, the end of the school year (for the monkeys) is extremely cathartic for me.

We open up backpacks and start purging.

If it doesn’t have a handprint or a picture on it, we toss it.

Well, at least we used to toss it.

Before Monkey Girl arrived on the scene.

Monkey Girl is a pack rat, like her father.

I realize that it may well be her coping mechanism for a mother who wants to throw everything away.

So, we compromise.

She goes through her pile of papers and “stuff” and decides what to toss and what to keep.

Once she’s done, we toss the toss pile.

Then, we go through the keep pile together and decide what to toss now.

It’s a good system.

We get rid of about 2/3 of her stuff that way, whereas, if it were left to her, we’d probably only toss 1/8.

Here’s the cute part, however.

As much as she does the whole “I ain’t tossin’ nothin’ and you can’t make me” routine, she’s got a lot of me in her, as well.

She loves to keep the unused pages in workbooks that have been sent home, so she created  binder with dividers for each subject, cut them out of the workbook, punched holes, and made herself a “summer workbook.”

She’s the only kid I know who, on the second to last day of school, is making a notebook of work to do so she doesn’t “forget how to do school work,” and can “be ahead of the game in September.”

It’s pretty cute.

To me.

Because it’s totally something I would have done.

Okay, it’s something I DID do, as a kid, but I honestly didn’t tell her about it.

She came to it on her own.

The boys do NOT share her prediliction for the summer work.

Monkey in the Middle basically dumped his entire backpack in the trash when he got home yesterday, as it WAS his last day.

“Monkey?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

(I know, again, my masterful use of dialogue astounds the mind.  Why I’m not a published author yet is beyond me.)

“You sure you don’t want to keep any of that?”

“Nope.”

So, I rescued things like his report card, photographs, and a letter from his teacher from the trash, and off he went.

Two different monkeys.

Two different approaches.

Yet, both completely like their mother.

Ah, genetics.