Workin' on My Closet Organization, Yo

Today in my closet, I discovered that I own a special maternity shirt that's specifically for wearing underneath maternity overalls. Like, the shirt comes to just beneath the boobs, with a big cutout for the belly. Um, OMG what? Reader, I cannot believe that I: a) bought such a shirt; and b) that I ever wore or considered wearing maternity overalls. It was from that Motherhood store. In my defense, this dated from my first pregnancy, eight years ago, when I was clueless about most things.

I found the shirt in a sarcophagus-sized rubbermaid container in the closet. The sarcophagus was filled with clothes that I packed up in California, two and a half years ago, to move to our new house here in Atlanta. And then I never touched them again. There was some good stuff in there. And there were some not-so-good moments. The role of Tim Gunn was played by my mother-in-law. At one point this afternoon, I was modeling a J. Crew white brocade bubble skirt with inverted box pleats. I got it on super clearance, all right? She was studying me skeptically, while I said things like, "Is the length wrong?" and "Picture it with a different top!" She said, "It's just bad. Really bad. Bad all over." So into the donate pile it went, along with the Motherhood top, and a batik dress from one of the times I decided I was really bohemian.

Clothing storage and organization is not one of my talents, and knowing that the situation was reaching critical levels, my mother-in-law had offered to come down and tackle the issue head-on. She is a treasure. So yesterday and today, we went through all of the clothes in my closet, both hanging things and clothes stashed in the sarcophagus. Shoes too. I think I hit upon a way to keep this from being totally daunting and unmanageable. I started with a completely clean bedroom. (My mom had helped me put away all of the clean laundry that had been sitting around in my room, bless her.) I started at one side of the closet, and only brought out a handful of hanging things at a time. We assessed each piece, and put it in one of these piles: Donate, Ebay, Garbage, and WTF? Kidding, actually it was just Donate, Ebay, Garbage, and Keep. The keepers I just carried right back into the closet, and then brought out another handful. Then we did the same with the sarcophagus and with the Mountain of Jeans that was overflowing a laundry basket in the corner of the closet. These weren't even the jeans that I wear. These were strange, forgotten jeans from some other lifetime, or a parallel dimension. Does everyone have those or is it just me?

This afternoon I took eight green garbage bags of clothes to Goodwill. Not absolutely all of them were mine--one bag or so was baby clothes. And I feel as thought a great weight has been lifted from the house. I still need to organize the hanging things better, like by summer and winter, etc. But it helped me realize what I have a lot of--sweaters, cardigans, and jackets--and what I need more of--layering tops and good-quality tees. And it was great to take a real inventory of what I have, and know that there was nothing lurking in a storage bin somewhere.

Plus my mother-in-law kept the kids while we went out last night, AND got up with them in the morning, two mornings in a row. We BEG her to move in with us, but she insists on having her own life. Hmmph. Hope y'all are having a good Saturday!