S-I-M-P-L-I-F-Y

Phew....just spent the last 2+ hours cleaning, sorting, and organizing my daughters toys while deciding what will stay here and what can go in the trailer. As I was doing this, actually as I have been doing everything the last few days, I was thinking, thinking, thinking about what we need to take, what we want to take and most importantly what we will actually be able to take. I have come to the conclusion that we own a ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous amount of stuff-we all have way too many clothes,I have too much kitchen gear, my husband has too many tools, kids have too many toys, too many stuffies, too many books, just too much everything!!!

While we may not have chosen to live in a small space as a means of simplifying, I'm actually quite excited about that aspect of it and think we will all benefit by realizing how little we truly need to be content. In actuality, even after simplifying we will have taken more stuff than we really need. It will be interesting to come home in the spring, back to all of our stuff and space, and see how we feel then.

I heard a news story sometime last week about a family in Florida building the largest house in America, if I remember correctly, which had a 4000 ft.² closet!! That is just ridiculous, no matter that more than three of my homes and probably a dozen of our trailers could fit in that closet, no one needs that much space just to store all their stuff. Especially, when so many live with so much less. It just makes me shake my head sometimes, we live in a world with royally screwed up priorities. I hope we can raise our children to see that, and maybe help to correct the inequality.

Anyhow, toys are packed, our bathroom supplies are half packed (as much as we can anyhow) and when I check the long-range forecast (14 days) it shows the day before we leave! There's been a cold making the rounds through our house (so far I am the only one who has escaped) so as soon as that has passed we will be busy packing that we can and making list after list after list after list for everything else!

TOYS in the trailer bunk room (which could sleep five! Believe it or not) - not shown, big bucket of Lego's, dragons,people and horses (for the castle) or the girls stuffed animals.
the doors to the right of the castle open up (the Barbies and Littlest Pet Shops are on the bottom shelf) which is where the girls pants and shirts will go. If you look under the bottom bunk, there are three drawers where we will store their socks, underwear, pajamas, etc.
we have two slides in our trailer and I am sure glad that one of them was in this bunk room, it will be nice for the kids to have a bit of space to play inside-especially given that we will be spending the winter in rainy Oregon.