Spring Garage Sale!

I mentioned a few days ago that in addition to finishing a quilt on the road I also held a garage sale while visiting my parents. It was our solution to getting rid of everything we cleaned out and making a little extra cash as well.

Isn't that always the dilemma? We are constantly cleaning out in an effort to make our homes more organized. The letting go of our stuff seems to be hard enough for all of us (isn't it just stuff?), but then when you finally get the motivation to say goodbye to the bucket o'plastic kids' meal toys or the funky candle holder from great-aunt Betty, what do you do with it all?

1) As an American family, we just have too much junk.
2) Things simply wear out, stop fitting, out grow their purpose, etc. Things of this world are not permanent.
3) When we become less, He becomes greater - this applies to all aspects of our life, including our home.

So here are the details of the first of many garage sales I'm sure - since we're all sinful, and I'm betting that our household will continue to struggle with the accumulation of worldly goods. I have been slowly going through everything from clothes, to dishes, to baby items we never used or don't want to keep for the next one the past few months. Each time I visited my parents, I would take a load in preparation for the garage sale at the end of May.

The Clean out:

Empty Hangers, now doesn't that feel good? 

I filled the rest of this big old box with DVD's we never watch.

Now I have room for a few picture frames instead of just shelf after shelf of books we've already read.

The Sale:

We were blessed with a beautiful and breezy May day in Texas for the sale.

The Profit:  $182.50

This was my first garage sale, so I didn't know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised with our profit. The books and DVD's that were left at the end of the day went on to Half Priced Books. The only part of our clean out that didn't get put in the garage sale was our pile of clothes. Those will be donated to the Boys and Girls Club just down the road here in Missouri.

Anyone else host a garage sale after spring cleaning? Have you found them to be worth your time? Or do you prefer to donate? What are other ways you clean out when your family is drowning in stuff?

Traveling with a Baby and a Dog

.....and without Seth.

I have been on a massive - over 2100 mi. - road trip these past two weeks (sorry - there's your explanation for the lack of posts) without my other half. Being a military family means lots of training away from home for Seth and lots of "visiting family for the last time" before our next big move for me and the little guy.

 
We PCS (permanent change of station) to Ft. Lewis, WA, at the end of July. Don't worry y'all will get to hear all about packing/moving/driving out west with an eight month old soon enough, but this month we took a practice run - for lack of a better term - through Louisiana and Texas to visit all the relatives. Oh, and I brought Toby, our 80 lb. German shepherd/lab/rottweiler mix along for the ride. Everyone did surprisingly well in the car, and when Seth can't travel with us, I actually prefer to bring Toby along - no one even thinks about messing with us.

Of course there were just a few (read: tons of) tears while stuck on a bridge for 2.5 hours in Baton Rouge with a starving baby while all traffic headed east and west was forced off the highway. Mommy just about had a break down while cutting off three lanes of traffic, doing an illegal U-turn, and literally catching air in the X-terra through an intersection. It was the end of two days of driving, and I really didn't think I could handle sitting in one more single red light. It was all very dramatic, and we were all screaming/barking as we flew through that intersection.

With all that said, the rest of our trip was cake.

So, here's the run down for traveling with child and pet:

1) We leave early.
 - I feed Henry at 5am, and we are on the road by 5:30. This way Henry sleeps for 3-4 hours before we even have to think about stopping.

2) We still cloth diaper on the road.
- I really couldn't live without my Planet Wise Wet/Dry Bag. It has a zipper side for clean diapers and one for the dirty. Since it is soft, I can stuff it anywhere there happens to be room for it in the car. Also machine washable!

Our wet/dry bag full of dirties. 

You can see the zipper for clean diapers there on the right.

- I do use disposable wipes. I can't seem to think of a good way to keep cloth wipes damp, mildew free, and spill free for such a long trip. If we were driving to one location and staying, I don't think there would be a problem, but we went through 6 states and 7 cities in 2 weeks. It was just a lot. Any cloth diaper moms have a solution for me?

3) I allow myself and Henry to each have one carry-on sized bag.
- If it doesn't fit, we don't need it. I packed one weeks worth of clothes and just did laundry along the way.
- Henry's bag: clothes, blankets, burp cloths, toys, board books.

4) Toby gets a small backpack.
- food, bowls, leash, two tennis balls, one squeaky toy, and a bag of food.

5) My Seven sling
- this allows me to wear the baby and still have two hands to unload, walk the dog, etc.

Wearing our boy on a walk this past spring.

6) The extras:
- Henry can't sit up on his own yet, so the Puj bathtub came with us. It lies flat and doesn't take up much room.

Here is the Puj ready for bath time, but it unsnaps and flattens for storage.

- We recently started introducing formula and solids, so one reusable grocery bag for food and bottles.
- One bag for my laptop and camera.
- One diaper bag

There is always more on the way home because we have three very generous sets of grandparents who love to spoil our little guy, but there's the list folks. It might still be more than we need, but I do try and keep it to a minimum. Playing both parents for a couple of weeks is a big job, and the less we're traveling with, the better.

Ok, what is a must on your travel list? Is there something you just never leave home without when you've got the baby on board? What does your pooch need on a family vacation? Any seasoned parents out there with tips on traveling with a little one?

The Book that got us thinking:

Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher

A good friend of mine told me about this book four years ago, and it took me another two to finally order it from Amazon.com . After it arrived in the mail, I could not put it down. I felt like Crunchy Cons really put into words so many ideas that had been aimlessly floating around my head and even threw out a few reasons as to why I might have been feeling the way I did. Rod Dreher and his book just got me thinking and gave me confidence in my own ideas.

From the back cover of the book, A Crunchy-Con Manifesto:
1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics. 
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship - especially of the natural world - is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk's conviction that "the institution most essential to conserve is the family."

There's a little peak into Crunchy Cons, but I'll let you read all the nutty goodness between the binding for yourself. Happy reading!