Up to my elbows in junk

Today my mission was to organize and price my yard sale stuff. I had already hauled my collection out of the attic and into the garage. I had raided closets and cupboards to find anything that I hadn't used since we moved here (which less than two years ago). I didn't count on having a lot of stuff since I regularly purge but somehow I managed to come up with piles of stuff.

So first thing this morning, I headed outside to the garage to begin the task of pricing. And things were going well until, the children decided they wanted to be involved. Now as a good mother, I welcome any opportunity to teach my children. So today when they asked if they could help, I hesitantly said yes. I knew I was setting myself up but I really wanted to believe that there was some lesson for them to learn from this experience. Perhaps, they would learn the value of objects? Or how purging unused things cleanses the mind and frees you from clutter? Or how helping one another makes you feel better?

So I made them stand at attention as I gave them their orders. No fighting over items, no double stickers, no taking back items and when items were priced they went in a new pile. So I doled out their stickers and the fun began.

They would grab an item, ask how much, I would tell them and into the pile it went. Then the confusion began. Holden, being the graceful child that he is, kept knocking over the glassware that was in the priced pile. So I moved it to another space hoping to keep it out of his reach. Then Harrison spotted some cars that he just had to have back. I caved. It just wasn't worth the fight. I figured I could steal them back at some point when he lost interest.

As the priced pile grew larger, it started merging with the unpriced pile. Seems that walking an extra ten steps to the other side of the priced pile to deposit the item was too much work. So the items kept getting mixed up.

Not to mention that now Harrison, who had been given the job of sorting the play kitchen items, had turned them into a demolition pile for his trucks and was scattering them across the garage.

Then the tape incident happened. Let me just say that when you tell children to tape something you should be very specific about the amount of tape that they are to use. Or better yet, you should probably do it yourself. Thinking that the job of taping a bag of Fisher Price people to the Fisher Price house was under control, I turned my back to more important things. When I looked back, half the roll of packing tape was wound tightly around the entire house and bag. It would take an engineer to figure out how to remove this tape.

Thankfully about an hour into this adventure, the children had enough fun and left me to go play at the neighbors house. So I picked up the pace and finished the pricing before my helpers returned for round two.