As we all know from reading Zen Habits, the Four Laws of Simplicity are as follows:
- Collect everything in one place.
- Choose the essential.
- Eliminate the rest.
- Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely.
After witnessing the awesome results on a barely visible dining room table, I decided to apply this powerful recipe to the mangled post-Christmas gift explosion that had taken over our once spacious living room. I am proud to say that we are all breathing a lot easier (yes, even Emily) now that I managed to identify and subtract the following toys from our ever-increasing household katamari:
- Phone with piercing melodies and a four inch long cord that made lengthy conversations a bit of a neck ache
- Tupperware lid
- Sleep mask that my dad scored on his flight over, alongside a disembodied phone receover
- Pushchair Puffy Snake
- WTF?
- Teletubbies. Nuff said
- An elephant mixed with a duck that used to hang from some sort of play mobile
- Two halves of a plastic cucumber that would combine if both bits of velcro weren’t the same
- Infinite-shaped teething toy
- Möbius-shaped teething toy
- Jingle Bunny
- Plastic clothing hanger
- Quadruple helix
- Little Rattle Bear.
- Teething ring filled with suspicious liquid
- Hand-held steamroller
- Bath time water pump (we’re not ready for this yet)
- Inky Pinky Parlez Vous
- Emily’s first computer keyboard
Dude, seriously? You got rid of Inky? I think thing slike the Quadruple helix could find good homes on Craigslist. Do you guys use freecycle in Spain?
We use this great system called “give it to someone who’s having a kid, or hide it in a closet in case you’re thinking of having another and don’t want someone else’s kid slobbering all over it”.
Inky? Inky is family. I want him, please. I can´t bear to think Inky is going to be ditched.
The rest of these toys have f*** all personality, but Inky, he has character.
Don’t worry, Ed. Inky is safe and sound. He’s one of the few items that we want to hide is a secret place just in case one day another little Zamrycki shows up and needs some company. With character!