The Pile

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is everything that was inside the first five boxes.

Nick already shared that the first small box had a seemingly first edition of Les Miz.

Now, let's take a peek at box 2 and 3.


Look! All the baby toys we've been missing! A baby fantasyland!

And the big lesson for me--I found a baby nuk holder thingie...just like the one I went out and bought when Cole was a newborn because, wait for it, I couldn't find THIS one! And, to top it off, Cole wouldn't take a nuk, so that was like, four bucks down the drain. If I had been more organized, that nuk holder could have been a Starbucks coffee!

Also found was my favorite stuffed animal as a little girl, Ling-Ling the panda. He could not be thrown away, even though he looks a little raggy. I put him on my dresser.

Moving on...

Box 4 first appeared to be only cookbooks, but on closer examination, there were also a few novels.

Box 5 was full of plates and glasses.



The major score was finding the wooden cup with the little mouse inside that used to sit on Sissy's cabinet when I was little. Whenever we would visit, I would run to peek inside the cup. And notice how Cole is attracted to it, too, as his little hand inches toward it on my leg.

So, at this point we were about an hour into our adventure. My grandmother stopped in for a few minutes and then Cole needed a nursing break and a rousing version of "Wheels on the Bus," then it was decision time.

What to do with all this stuff? Here's the breakdown...

37 books (SOME KEPT - SOME IN GIVE OR SELL BOX)
1 Creative Irish Gifts Catalog from 1998 (JUNK!)
1 Stratford Bard Newspaper from 1998 (JUNK!)
1 Charles Barkley sports card from a cereal box (?)
100 recipe cards (KEPT)
2 broken phones (KEPT for toys)
1 box of my stepfather's dump run business cards (CLAIMED by Genny)
7 stuffies (KEPT)
1 Andy Capp dart feather (JUNK!)
40 baby toys (KEPT)
1 plastic bottle holder (CLAIMED by Genny since we don't use bottles)
1 Target dog bone used as baby toy (KEPT)
11 baby utensils (KEPT)
1 Tweety bird gift bag (KEPT)
1 mouse in wooden cup (KEPT)
7 glasses, maybe hand blown because all slightly different sizes (KEPT)


1 sugar bowl - 1865- Potter Co. - Trenton, NJ (KEPT)


1 baby spoon and 1 plate - Pope-Gossier - China - Patented C26 - Made in China (What to do with ?!)
6 bowls, saucers and tea cups - Noritake - Japan - The Coniston (What to do with ?!)

Pieces of junk? 5

There was also one old book, The Story of Architecture, by Charles Whitaker, from 1934, which we put in the SELL pile.

I sorted through the cookbooks while Nick slipped into the kitchen and returned with all my cookbooks from the closet. So, added bonus, we also cleaned out one kitchen pantry closet shelf. I chose about half the cookbooks to keep and the rest were relegated to the ? box.



I'm proud to say that I even got rid of one of my mother's Family Circle circa 1972 cookbooks after I photographed page 155, the recipe for chicken parmigiana that my sister loved. The page was VERY food stained. Sigh. Normally I would have kept it for sentimental reasons (it's not the kind of cooking I do), but I can't keep everything just because it was my mother's.

I like this idea of photographing sentimental things and then passing them on.



Here is my mother's recipe for bread pudding, which I don't like. Photographed and tossed. Sorry, mom!

That's about it. Lessons learned? We're not good at getting rid of stuff! We've got a lot to learn. And we're going to run into big problems with all the stuff that we don't know if it's valuable or not, but just to be safe, we'll put it into a box, which might end up back in the cellar?!

Help us!