Our family has just moved from Croydon North to North Ringwood. It was not a big move in terms of distance but it was huge in terms of the amount of stuff to move.
At the previous house we had a large shed where we kept tools, garden tools, son’s camping equipment, daughter’s furniture and mum’s STUFF (usually a less polite word was used to describe my STUFF)
My STUFF included some boxes of books for the Gifted Resources Library, boxes of family books, plastic crates of homeschooling books and materials, plastic crates of Sunday School programs (many of which I had written myself), teaching materials and visual aids and a couple of boxes of precious pictures, stories etc which the children had done when they were young.
I had been working on sorting and discarding much of my STUFF for several weeks prior to the move. I had a discard pile on one side of the shed, boxes of books to go to an Op Shop in one pile and the keepers in another.
With only a few days to go till the move the others got into the act and decided that Mum’s STUFF was the main problem, that Mum was a horder and all the STUFF should be turfed out.
The item that was chosen to battle over was a pair of felt boards which act as a folio carrier for Sunday School visual aids which I had created. “You are not using these. When did you last use them? Have you used them in the last six months?”
“Well, no… but this is a memory verse puzzle about creation – it took me ages to make and I use it every time we do Genesis and these are all visual aids for Christmas and we have one of those every year. And these flannel boards would be expensive to replace It would take lots of time and money to replace this and it does not take up much space!”
It is very much a case of one man’s treasure is another’s trash. I heard recently of a family who burnt all the papers which had been kept by their elderly aunt only to find out afterwards that amongst the ashes were the childhood drawings of a world famous artist!
Gifted Resources 