School’s out!! If you stop by your child’s school it will look bare, cleaned out. That’s because every child’s home now has 12.5 inches more stuff in it per child!!! At least it feels like it doesn’t it? What happens to that pile? If you’re lucky, it stays neatly in the backpack until your angel systematically separates everything out and shares all their earthly goods with you and then get rids of most of it. Yeah right!
More often then not, that pile gets dumped on a table, a counter top, or the pile/pack combo sits in lump somewhere for WEEKS pleading for you to look at it. How much time do you spend moving it, stepping over it, stressing about it, telling the kids to take care of it?
This year try something new. Tell the kids that the papers are going to be gone through right away. Get it done BEFORE you do a fun activity. Decide what the piles will be. If there are a lot of papers, I suggest that YOU be VERY SELECTIVE in what you look at. Enjoy this process. Ask the kids to pull out the special projects and homework assignments they are really proud of. Go through those first. Then decide what else you want to tackle. If there are lots of are projects (which bulks up many memory boxes), ask the kids to pick their favorites, and you keep only a couple additional if you see some really good ones.
The point is— get through this NOW. Just do it— NOW. Don’t let that mole hill turn into a mountain!!! Happy summer.