An introduction

    Let me start by introducing myself.  My name is Jody and I am a Stay at Home Mom with two little girls, ages 4  and 1 1/2 years-old.  Before I was a stay at home mom, I was a Kindergarten and First grade teacher for 10 years.  The idea for this blog came about a few weeks ago, when my husband and I felt that it was time to clean out our storage facility and put the $200 a month, we were paying to store our stuff, into savings for something of more value.  When we went to the unit, we realized half of the storage unit was filled with my treasures that I collected or should I say hoarded over the ten years that I had been teaching.  Since I have no idea when or if I will go back to teaching, my husband felt that we needed to get rid of my "teaching crap" because it was costing us more money to hold on to it then it was actually worth.  It wasn't like we were storing actual valuable items in that unit.  That unit would have been a big dissappointment to someone bidding on it on an episode of "Storage Wars."
     The definition of a hoarder is someone who has persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions.  I have hoarded cookbooks, Parenting magazines (thinking one day there might be an article I might need to read), and even my pins on Pinterest seem to be excessive. I can always justify why I need to keep these things. I even thought that if I didn't go back to teaching , I could use my teaching resources to help my children when they were in Kindergarten and First grade.  But of course, my oldest would rather play Barbies with me or dress up her Build-a-Bears, rather than practice writing her numbers and letters.  So I have decided to combat this hoarding and started by getting rid of my Parenting magazines and now I need to tackle this project. I think one of the reasons it is hard to get rid of it is because I feel guilty about how much money I had spent over the years on these items.
     So, I felt as I delve through the boxes and donate my teaching supplies to either the library or any schools that would profit from my resources, I would take one last fun project from each to try and attempt with my girls. It might sound silly to some , but I thought that it might help letting my "stuff" go a little bit easier.  My husband says just "take a picture" of things you want to give away, that way you can still hold on to the memory and not the item.  That's what I figured I will do here.  If I find something in these boxes that are "worthy" of documenting in photos, I will do so on this blog.