Old school | Pad Patter 26 Mar

Oh gosh Justine, I can so relate to your post. I went through years of stuff back in February. To be totally fair, I'm a ridiculously sentimental person, so it's SOOOO hard for me to part with stuff ... and to have to wade through 3 kids' worth of stuff about did me in. Some of it I scanned and dumped, so I still had record of it but not the clutter. I have a big box of projects and other noteworthy assignments, but dumped a bunch of it.

 

I have a few not all in folders in a cabinet, nothing fancy.

 

No kids so have nothing there.

However, when I cleaned out the basement, I had to go through all of my notes from my college classes... in the 1970's. Also some stuff I had from when I taught 1 year in a local business school (handouts etc), most of which I had obtained during my college days in business ed classes. Since it was all paper, I recycled it.

I also found some school work belonging to my mother when she was 13 years old. One item was really interesting since it was a mini scrapbook of "13 things about me at 13" (written in 1945). I scanned it and recycled the original. All the gradebooks from her 32 years of teaching were down there as well. Got rid of those too. They hadn't been looked at for 35 years, why keep them.

Let's put it this way... I got rid of a heck of a lot during the purge. Anything that I thought was interesting, I either took a picture or scanned then got rid of it because to be honest, most of the stuff was falling apart anyways.

 

I got better and better at throwing things out with each kid lol. I have tried to keep a few things from each one, but more of Chance's stuff is in picture form rather than the original. As they got older, a lot of their stuff was thrown away by them before I ever saw it. I have a few of my things and they are tucked away in our attic space (which I really need to clean out). The kids' stuff is here and there, in drawers and cabinets...no organization at all.

 

Looking back, that is a definite! I used to put newspaper articles in those artist drawing paper tablets when I was in high school and college. Photos went in albums. Mom did photo albums of my childhood that sadly were falling apart. I transferred everything in them to Creative Memories albums. She included all kinds of ephemera as well as photos and most things had a notation of what/where/when for it. I also found an album she had done of her wedding! That ended up being one of the first things I transferred to a CM album since it was falling apart. I never knew she had it and found it in a closet when I was moving into that bedroom.

Sadly, I didn't actually find "scrapbooking" until after she had passed away. Had it been around and popular even 15 years earlier I think it would have been something we would have done together.

 

DD is in her 3rd year of Uni and we recently got rid of grade8, 9, 10 etc note books.
She doesn't want to keep them, I have her early years and her art photographed and her written stories so I think we are good.
Each of the kids now has a container of stuff to keep and I am good with that.

It would have been better if they decided for themselves what was important but they left it to me.

 

I am still trying to go through stuff.. I went through and chucked 2 bags of stuff.. old papers over 100 years etc photos with unknown origins or of a fish or a tree LOL I have tons more to do but my mental state has issues going through my parents stuff plus my old stuff. I have stuff like stamp collections etc and while I do not like yard sales there are things worth money so I need to take the stamps to a stamp collector etc. I do not sell on the likes of ebay etc. I do not trust that stuff so that is wearing me down too once I go through stuff is where can I go to sell. I have reel to reel tapes with the recorder, my mother would splice home movies so I have the splicer and other stuff the metal movie reels all that stuff and no clue where to part with it. I have VCR tapes to ditch amongst other things.. It is so overwelming for sure and the older paper is it is a fire hazard so the stuff I do not need that is not family history needs to get tossed. UGH

 

I have gone through all my kids' art and papers from preschool through high school and kept just a few things from each year in their actual original version. I store these in accordion folders with a section for each year. Sort of like this: https://myorganized.life/products/s..._A-tIeB2IH6DmXlKRttdVm_YCevVOZ7hoC1XMQAvD_BwE.

The rest, I have pulled out the best, photographed it and then tossed everything.

 

I photographed anything I wanted to save and kept very little of the paperwork my kids produced. What I have kept is in a file cabinet.

 

I photograph a lot of things and have them on EHD's. There are some things I just can't part with. The grandkids about ran me out of the house with all of their art. As they got older, their art got photographed and they get the biggest kick out of seeing pictures of some of their art projects.

That being said, I still have tons of pictures and slides. Yikes! Slides were "the thing" at one time and I had everything to show them. Like people really wanted to sit and look at slides. LOL I'm in the process of scanning my slides - I'm doing them myself, but I'm going to give up and take them somewhere. It's a grueling job.

It's really draining to look at old pictures, like Christa @cfile - she put it so succinctly - "mentally draining". I just can't do it for very long and then I'm depressed, so I don't put myself through it very often. Some of you know that I lost my son several years ago and I can still hardly stand to go through old pictures. I have beautiful pictures from his Marine Graduation that I've asked Ava to do something with one of these days. They're all safely stored away but they pretty much stay there. Anything after the digital age is safe and I have lots and lots and lots of digital pictures. I've been on Flickr since 2008 and have about 30,000 pictures on there.

 

Big hugs my friend. I did not know re your son. Sending a big hug. xo (I have scanned all my slides and still have them and the movies and the reel to reel .. I don't know what to do with them. It will hurt me so much to throw them out.)

 

I have some originals - combo of art work and school work. Plus various awards. I haven't kept a lot but what I do have is not well organized at all. @gonewiththewind I'm impressed - I could probably get everything for both kids in one bin, but I really like the way you have your storage system set up! Maybe a project for next winter.

 

OMG Cheryl I didn't know that either. My heart hurts for you.

 

If I did that ... one would have kept everything and the other would have tossed everything.