Whew! Guys, I earned my bed/blog/YouTube time today!! I feel like I occasionally earn it by just being allowed to lay in bed, or because I’m building a human and chasing two all day long. But today, I really earned it!
I’ve been hit by the nesting bug, which doesn’t happen too terribly often, and I want to take advantage of it! However, most of the jobs that need doing around our house are a bit too big for one person to tackle. Yesterday, I was feeling the same way, but decided I should take Monday as a low key day, and reassess everything the next day. Well, thats today, and I NEEDED to get something done. So I continued yesterdays trend of a tidy kitchen and did the breakfast and lunch dishes. Which took all of four minutes maximum. Then what? Now that we’re training Dekker on tidying up the basement every evening, the upstairs looks like a total pigsty. I could do that, but the kids were napping upstairs, and them hearing me “playing” with their toys likely wouldn’t help them sleep. It had to be downstairs.
So I tackled our pile of recycle stuff in the furnace room. If you remember, I began (and never finished 🙁 ) a HUGE house purge a while back. It screeched to a halt when my morning sickness entered, and I’ve never picked back up on it. The furnace room is in shambles again, which is really sad. That was a HUGE job. Whats good is that a ton of the mess is removed and thrown away. There is waaay less stuff in there, but its still a huge mess than impossible to move around. Under the work bench is where we keep our recycling. Bags and bags and bags of recycling. Five and a half YEARS worth of recycling. Thats right. We have never ONCE taken in our recycling. So you can imagine what a daunting job this was. But its been nagging at me for a while, and to avoid becoming someone who nervously eats their own eyebrows, I decided to at least start. That was my goal. If a job seemed too ominous, I’d at least start, and try. It doesn’t hurt to try right?
Well, that enormous pile is OVER! In my entrance, I have four large black garbage bags of plastic bottles and cans to bring in to SARCAN. Downstairs, I have all of our glass bottles separated into beer/alcohol bottles, and then non-alcoholic bottles like Jones or Nestea. I’m not hauling all that glass upstairs myself! Two more garbage bags outside of our front door full of lids, bottles that were waaay too icky to make someone handle, grocery bags that held recycling in the past, and any random garbage within an arms reach. And two diapers from this morning, haha! SO MUCH GARBAGE!!! And so much success. I still have to do my research and find out if glass jars from things like pasta sauce give a return, or where to leave those. And is it better to bring beer bottles to SARCAN or to a liquor store? Either way, my back is pissed about sitting on a concrete floor for quite so long but I feel pretty awesome actually.
The point of this post is to say how interesting our recycling is! I know probably no one else will get a kick out of this, but I just scanned through our entire marriage in a way!
The recycling towards the back, so the oldest stuff, was from earlier in our life together. It consisted of the occasional 2L pop bottle, which was usually something weird that we haven’t had since, or lemonade. There were big 1.5L water bottles that we always used to buy for trips. Our cans consisted of V8, which I used to drink when I worked in the city, and club soda for the ridiculous amount of italian sodas we used to make. There were numerous massive pickle jars, as well as completely different milk jugs from what we drink now!! I had completely forgotten that we drank milk with a different fat content when we first got together. A silly thing, but a memory I had lost until today.
In the middle stuff, there were LOTS more water bottles, littler ones, that I’m pretty sure we used to buy by the case when Dekker started drinking formula and we took bottled water everywhere we went. That stage was pretty much just those bottles and Coke cans, because thats Bradys favorite. The 2L pop bottles phased out, as well as the club soda. I saw the occasional juice bottle.
Now, the recent past, our recycling has changed. We’ve completely stopped holding onto the milk jugs, for one thing. Not because they’re not important to recycle, but because we had SO much recycling and not enough space, and this family burns through milk. I dont know about you guys, but we buy three 4L jugs of milk at a time and if we’re lucky, they last a week. We like milk around here. So, no milk jugs. Lots more cans of pop. And considerably more alcohol. Now, lets clarify this. I have not a single thing against people who drink regularly. Beer-a-day people, go hard! No issue here! BUT seeing these things made me really, really happy because it means that, in our recent past, we have entertained waaay more than we have in the last five years!!! We rarely have alcohol in the house unless we have people over. I mean, we have a little cupboard with a few things in it, and likely a few beer in the basement fridge, but they take a very long time to disappear. Its not something we count on. But we like to have something special in the house for when we have guests. Seeing the beer bottles reminds me of all the people we’ve had over in the last year or so. We’ve had more overnight guests since Laela was born than all the years leading up to that. And we’ve finally started having people over for dinner, or the weekend, or what have you, and to me, this silly little thing represents that. I really liked seeing how we’ve grown into adults who can entertain and run our household.
Now that I’ve had my realization, I am so over my huge pile of bags of bags of recycling. Once Brady is home, I’m getting all that glass out of my basement, and swapping out a pile of garbage bags for a Rubbermaid garbage can. We’ll still recycle our stuff, but with considerably smaller amounts at a time.
Sigh. Success, and a sore back. Time for YouTube and recipe hunting.