Purge-a-palooza 2008

July seems to be the month of purge in Casa Zustiak. Two years ago, the week before Riley was born, I went on a cleaning/organizing rampage. There wasn't an extraneous article of anything left in this house. When I came home from the hospital, it was to a clean, well-organized home. Last year, as we prepared for Riley's first birthday I again went on a cleaning and organizing binge. I bought and constructed bookshelves for both of the kids' rooms and for the living room. I sorted through toys and put away stuff that neither of them played with (and hid the books that I secretly hated--shhh!).

This year, the cleaning has reached new heights. Rooms that weren't tackled before (or that were tackled with a corner-cutting attitude) are being brought down left and right. Preparing for the garage sale was just the beginning. Over the course of the past 3-4 weeks I've managed to clean our every closet in my house (7 of them including the pantry), the laundry room, the garage (honestly, I'm surprised that we're not still cleaning out that puppy), my dresser, the desk--you name it. We even rented a steam-cleaner and I cleaned all of our carpet (mental note--we really must do that more often). I think Caleb's going to rent a power washer and clean the outside of the house this week as well.

Today I cleaned out the fridge. Now, this shouldn't have been nearly the task that it was. I did just clean it out the first week of June (making room for stuff for Connor's birthday party). Somehow, I missed about 25 bottles of condiments, some of which had expiration dates from 2005!! Pathetic. I spent a great deal of time rinsing out containers of sweet and sour sauce, barbeque sauce, cocktail sauce, cottage cheese, cream cheese, etc. As I rinsed out the sweet and sour squirt bottles, I had an epiphany: wash them out and save them for some bath time fun.

For a very brief moment, I thought I was Super Mom, dispeller of bath-time boredom, friend of the environment. Then I realized that Super Mom clearly would not have let not one, but two bottles of sweet and sour sauce go bad in her refrigerator.

Now I return to my mundane tasks of purging and organizing. Once that is complete, I can actually...I don't know....run the vacuum, maybe. With Dora the Explorer as my witness, this house will be in tip-top shape by 4:00 p.m. on Friday, when we start Riley's birthday party!!