Cleaning out the closets and dressers during the pandemic

 

Today, my mood is content. My kids and I have been having the most wonderful week. They have been super helpful, which is always a surprise.

Like everyone else, we have been home due to the virus that is circulating around. And now that it's summer, they have been getting really bored and antsy. So, I gave them an idea last week: go through their closets, dressers, and their entire rooms, getting rid of any clothes that don’t fit them anymore. Or rather I should say, getting ready to get rid of their old clothes.

See, we realize that there is no reason to throw away your old clothes like garbage. What we do every few months to every year (depending on whether there is a growth spurt in progress, like two years ago when my youngest boy was growing half a foot in three months) is we take out all of their clothes and put them in a pile in the middle of the floor. Whatever they don’t like goes into the Staten Island clothes donations pile. Whatever they aren’t sure fits, they try on, right then and there. The clothes they like and that fit, they go back into their closets and drawers neatly and cleanly.

This takes up a whole lot of time, so usually we save it for summer vacation or winter vacation, or a time when they are off from school with lots of time on their hands. During this whole virus mess, they have done this three times. Because, what you don’t realize is, each time, they may miss some stuff. And these kids, they have a lot of stuff. Which isn’t a bad thing, it just is something. This latest time, there wasn’t as much stuff for two of them, since like I said, they already did it twice. But my girl was different.

She is the youngest, and she is super spoiled. She has a lot of aunts and girl cousins, and they are all older than she is, so they give her their old clothes. This means she has more stuff than my two boys combined. Unfortunately, boys clothes are just not that way. Boys pretty much wear their clothes out in our family. But my two are not that way, at least the younger one isn’t. He is very smart, and he is very gentle on his clothes. My older one, though, he already wears grown men sizes, and he is not as easy on his clothes.

But the best part of all of this is that we get to give these clothes to people who need them, because we donate our clothes on Staten Island. We give them to a charity that actually provides them to children and families in need, and we are able to see exactly where they go afterward. Many families with children on public assistance will have good clothes to wear this summer, thanks in part to my three kids. We will probably do this again, at least one more time, very soon.