Reduce, reuse, recommit to decluttering for the 4,723rd time.

I'm staring at a stack of fluffy, newly washed diapers and a dish rack tumbled full of freshly washed bottles. A clothesbasket of clean laundry sits on the floor next to the couch, a pile of newspapers to be recycled next to the front door. Lots of organizing has happened around here today. And yet, the house is still a grade-A disaster.

I've never been what one would call a neat freak, not ever in my life. My mother spent most of the first 18 years of my life despairing of ever having me clean out the crap from under my bed, the place where I shoved everything when I didn't feel like dealing with it. Today, the modern day equivalent of under the bed is the office, where the adult things I don't feel like dealing with get dumped, and the despair is no longer my mother's but my husband's. I am a clutter freak. A packrat. A disorganized mess, if you're being uncharitable, and a charming slob, if you're not.

There's no question where the clutter gene came from. If you walk in to either one of my parents' homes, you'll see they have the same problem. My parents, both born within spitting distance of the Great Depression, learned that you don't just throw things away; you keep them forever. If something breaks, you fix it - or you put it in the basement until you get around to fixing it, which is the more likely scenario. If you have an Item X, and Item X gets old, you don't think of replacing it. Why would I replace it? I have a perfectly good one! But if for some reason, you do choose to replace it, maybe there's a new one with new features or whatever, then Old Item X does not get chucked - it gets stored until you find a new home for it. That new home usually means "pawn it off on a kid going to University" but we've only got so many of those in this family, so the alternative becomes "keep it for a yard sale", one of which I've been promising my husband I would hold every spring for the last 5 years and never quite manage. So these hoarding tendencies then ran smack dab into my husband's Upper Canadian "get a new one if you want a new one!" attitude, and has created a total stuff monster.

Recently a new show has come on A&E called Hoarders. This show is about packrats gone wild, people who cannot bear to part with anything until their homes are overrun with stuff. I have a secret fear that I am one of these people. I watch as they justify keeping piles of old magazines ("there's an article in that issue of Style at Home from October 2002 I wanted to read!") or old broken hair dryers ("there's nothing wrong with it, just needs a new fuse!") and I have so much empathy for them.

The difference between them and me is that I don't mind parting with things. I just hate *wasting* them. I hate sending things to a landfill when I know there is a home for it out there somewhere, if only I would take the effort to find it. I can remember being a little child and tossing a broken toy in the garbage, only to look at the landfill site wistfully every time we drove by it, knowing that little broken toy was still sitting there, rotting away. And since then, I imagine that little toy every time I pitch something into the garbage. Meaning, nothing gets thrown out unless I'm feeling particularly ruthless, which isn't often. More often, I put it in a pile for the recycle bin, which miraculously assuages my waste not/want not guilt by ensuring it won't go rot in a landfill. At least, I hope not.

But something's got to be done, because adding the extra work of a newborn into the mix has tipped this joint over the edge. The magazine I bought to read while I was giving birth in the hospital, three months ago, is still sitting on the ottoman, under a stack of new magazines I won't have time to read. The clothes my daughter has already outgrown rest in a pile beside the couch, needing to be transported into the storage bin in her closet. And never mind the piles of clean clothing sitting beside them. Or the four diaper bags in various stages of packed/unpacked resting on the kitchen stools.

Gah. You'll have to excuse me. I see a few things I have to recycle.