Become a minimalist… by having children.

I think I discovered the key to minimizing your life… and that key is a toddler.

For years and years I had glorious free time. And in that free time, I was free to do whatever I damn well pleased. Which is why half our back yard is taken up with garden, I have a pantry full of canning equipment, a spinning wheel, more yarn than I really need, fabric stash to nearly match, etc. Free time meant I needed to fill it with something… and fill it I did.

Now that I have a toddler, I have less time for hobbies. Or cleaning. Or thinking, really. What I’d rather do at the end of  day, more than anything else, is to sit on the couch with a glass of wine and have everyone shut the hell up and leave me alone to watch a show on TV and decompress. #sadbuttrue

Having a toddler means every tiny piece of paper, Tupperware, pens, DVDs, books, etc all get dragged out – sometimes at what feels like the exact same time leaving one epic mess to clean up. Toddlers mean forcing you to clean up your clutter, because after about the 5th time of putting things away you finally realize that there’s zero point to having the items in the first place when all you do is clean it up/put it back on the shelf/etc. Having a toddler means they discover things you totally forgot about but swore you’d get around to… five years ago. Having a toddler forces you to acknowledge that you only have a certain amount of hours to your day, and only a fraction of those can be dedicated to any sort of hobby… and it forces you to start picking and choosing what kind of hobby you want to use that precious time on.

This clutter-reducing Candice is a huge shift way from the one pre-kids. It’s taken a lot of introspection on why I held onto things. And lots of blog reading on minimalism, decluttering, and pretty much anything else that repeatedly tells me that things are just things and not the memories they hold. And, honestly, I’m still dealing with that. I’ll probably always deal with it because it’s so ingrained in who I am.

But, mostly? Mostly I’m just lazy. And tired of cleaning up the same things over and over again when they otherwise sit unused, all because this tiny little terrorist insists on playing with these items instead of his toys. You know, which we bought for him to play with so he would be occupied enough to stay out of the rest of the house. Ha! Joke is on us, I guess!