Cleanin' House

I think I am slightly deranged. Chris was gone on a business trip from Sunday until midnight on Thursday. The week was challenging, but apparently not challenging enough - because I decided to end the week with a bang: by participating in the neighborhood garage sale.

I greeted my husband early Friday morning with a "welcome home honey," now will you help me move all our old baby crap into the garage?

The sale was supposed to start at 9 a.m. We were swarmed by 8 a.m. with serious garage salers. My friend Christine had brought her stuff over and we sold, sold, sold until we both had fistfuls of one dollar bills stuffed in our pockets.

We continued the festivities on Saturday morning with Christine and our friends Cynthia and Greg. It was a garage sale party, complete with Starbucks delivered fresh by Greg. Our six kiddies kept each other entertained as we wheeled and dealed.

At the end of the morning, we had a fire sale with the leftovers, delivered two carfuls of stuff to Goodwill, and grilled up some hot dogs to celebrate. I ended up with about $350 in profit - not bad for a few exersaucers, some baby clothes, and books.

The garage sale was not just an excuse to clean out the basement, but it signaled a firm end to the baby years. While I have given baby clothes away here and there, this was the first full scale clean out of all our baby paraphernalia. Goodbye high chair. Goodbye exersaucers and bouncy seats. Goodbye boppy and your sweet soft chamois cover. So long changing table and baby swing. It's all gone now.

I am not going to dwell on the numerous customers of our garage sale who were forced to buy our baby stuff because they had sold/given away all their baby stuff and then got unexpectedly pregnant with baby three, four or five (!!). (My favorite was the woman on Friday who told us she just had her fourth baby, a two month old baby girl. When she broke the news to her husband that she was unexpectedly pregnant, he got dizzy and almost passed out. Hee.)