I wouldn't have believed it myself.

Alternately titled: How I Learned What Facilitate* Means.

Or: Last night, my husband did everything right.

Monday we received the postcard from the Vietnam Vets asking for our 'discards' and the truck would be in our neighborhood Thursday. I called the number and Tuesday night we cleaned out our closet.

My husband decided that we should also tackle the store room. In the process of living in our house it was looking more like the "before" picture.

Now... before we get too far into this, I am the 'keeper' - so I really felt the need to go through it myself.

We started right after dinner - I mixed myself a good, strong drink. I armed myself with black trash bags, a marker, and a box cutter and headed downstairs.

I started by dragging out the boxes and bags already marked 'donate.' I then started a bag for trash and a bag to donate. By this point, my husband's pretty excited. He loves to see things 'just so.' And it just might acutally happen this time! All he wants is to have the stuff off the floor.

As I weeded through the store room, one area at a time, I either put it in the donate, trash, pile for my sister, or back on the shelf. It actually went pretty quickly. I did my best not to look at it emotionally, but more practically - is this something we need to warehouse? There were a couple of boxes that I hadn't seen since I last organized - in January! Most of that stuff did not get put back.

My husband helped (facilitated) by hauling the stuff upstairs - the trash to the bin, the donate to the garage. That is what's hard for me - I love the organizing part of it, I tolerate the throwing things away, but I am terrible about actually putting it in the trash can. He also helped by not pushing my already sensitive button about saving stuff. And he offered to refill my drink several times, because it was clearly helping me.

That's where the black trash bags come in - if I can't see what's in there, I'm less likely to remember what's in there.

It was so nice walking out of the store room, and having the basement in the same shape as when we started. He also helped my keeping the kids busy so they wouldn't distract me.

Right now, it's back to the 'after' picture. We filled the trash bin and had about eight bags of donate. Next up - my craft room.

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*Facilitate : to make easier : help bring about - or as I call it - the heavy lifting.

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Conversation from our cleaning last night-

Me: Do you want this?
Him: Um...
Me: Because I'm not telling you to get rid of it.
Him: Um...
Me: It's ok to keep it.
Him: Ok, Let's keep it.

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