The Crap Room...oops I meant the nursery

As many of you know Shazam and I are apartment dwellers. One of the first thing people ask when they find out we are pregnant is when we are going to buy a house and move. The answer, not anytime soon. We have a great apartment in a two family house with two bed rooms. We actually have plenty of room. We can comfortably fit a baby in our apartment, so we will be staying put for a little while. One of my top reasons for staying is our commute. Shazam and I both work in the town next to where we live. My commute to work is less than 1.5 miles and Shazam's in about 4. We love our short commutes. I look forward to next year when I can pick up the baby and be home in less than 10 minutes. So while a nice yard for the hound would be great I am happy to set up our little home for our family right were we are. We can afford it and geez didn't trying to have more than you can afford get us into the mess we are in now???

Although we have some time before the baby gets here we have started to work on the 2nd bedroom so that a baby can live in there. When we moved into the apartment we decided that we would make the 2nd bedroom a craft room. It was great we went to i.kea and bought a work table and chairs and used the built in shelves for our supplies. We also used the room to store our surplus items, sports card collection, photos, camping equipment, sporting equiment, extra clothes, books and well every thing else we couldn't find a place for in the rest of the apartment. It soon became the crap room. With the wedding it only became worse. I have decided that having an extra room in ones house is a very bad thing! It allows you to keep things you should have thrown away years ago. Things when you look at them again you think, I moved that how many times???

We have done several sweeps of the room in the past few months. We started when we started ttc. But still the room has crap in it. We bought a bookshelf and moved the books out to the livingroom. We consolidated craft supplies. We emptied the closet of clothes that we never use. I went through my pictures and threw away all the crappy ones and sorted out my school ones and brought them to school. Shazam is working very hard on the sports cards and has culled them down and gotten them out of the 2' x 2' x 2' box and most into nice card boxes. We have sorted through old letters and thrown away half burnt candles that we had been keeping for some unkown reason. So after many trash bags and trips to the thrift store it is getting better.

Some things were harder to part with than others. I have to keep repeating that the memories of the person don't go away when you get rid of the stuff but still it is hard. I had several items that my grandmother had brought back from Africa. They were just carved animals, trinkets really, but I felt bad for letting them go. Even though the antelope had lost its antler and the water buffalo had a broken ear they were still hard to part with. I gave them to good will though. The weren't one of a kind and although they reminded me of my grandmother they aren't her. I did keep the dress she brought me from Kenya and perhaps if we have a girl she will wear it one day and of course hanging in my closet is her blue ginham polyester pant suit that she wore all the time and have pictures of her in on every continent (except Antarctica the only one she didn't get to visit). Truth be told I can understand why she wore that pant suit all the time. I tried it on once and boy is that thing comfy and I swear even though it is from the late 60s that thing is still perfect. I am saving it for my Mum when she gets to retierment age and I am sure it will be all ready for me when I am taking my senior trips with Shazam in 40 years. I swear they don't make things like they used to!

So we are plodding through our things which sometime I mistake for memories, to make room for the new ones we will make with our baby. Fully knowing that in a few years when we do move from our apartment into a house I will be packing up all those little socks not being able to part with the memories of when our baby was so small completly forgeting about the lessons we learned getting ready for the baby to come live with us.