{I am a Pack Rat}

I blame this on my grandpa. I think you have seen me mention going shopping at the big garage. Well, it was a Morton building full of stuff. Cars, a fire truck, furniture, you name it, he probably had it in there. I don't think anyone ever had to buy beds or furniture. In fact, other people would store their stuff up there too. It was insane trying to find anything up there. What's even crazier is they removed a bunch of the stuff and shifted it all around to have Christmas parties up there. Insane I tell you! Not to mention, some of this stuff being stored in there wasn't even his. Quite a bit was stuff someone needed a place to store and he had a huge building so in it went. I tell you what though, if he wouldn't have kept all that stuff, my boys would have been out of luck for beds when their bunk beds broke.

He also had a habit of picking through the goodwill bags my grandma would fill up and taking what he thought they should keep up there lol. It was out of the house so grandma couldn't really complain and it was there when we eventually needed it (which, lets be honest, someone always ended up needing whwhatever he had up there). It kind of drove my grandma nuts a little bit though lol. I can only imagine what their house would have looked like if he hadn't bought that building. I'm imagining an episode of TLC: Hoarders Buried Alive.



But because I saw him do so much hoardering (or saving..whatever you want to call it lol) I think I developed my own need to hoard a little bit. Not so much stuff I think we will end up using (which is kind of annoying because I get rid of things and a year later I need it again), but things from the kids and my childhood.

I absolutely love going through ond totes and boxes to see what I was like way back when. Going through my old journals especially! I love looking at pictures and remembering what was happening at that time. And since my grandpa passed (its been almost 7 months now...), memories are all I have and I cherish them so much. I want my kids to feel the same way when I'm gone and they go looking through their stuff. Maybe discovering pictures they'd never seen or reading things they didn't know about me. Which is why going through things and deciding what to pitch and what to store is so hard for me. So I keep almost everything, and there in lies my problem ladies and gents.

I have way too much memorabilia!

Take this little gem for instance..

This my dears is what's left of a silky from a blanket I stole from my little brother. I would suck my index finger and wrap this around my ring finger or sometimes my pinky. It went everywhere with me until I was about 10 lol. It's not special to anyone but me. And yet, I still have it. Tucked away in a box.

This is also something I've kept over the years. It's a little bitty plastic girl that lives in a walnut she'll lol. She smells like candy! My great grandma gave her to me because I didn't get anything of my great grandpa's when he passed. She is mine and I love her.

There are no shortage of pictures either! Check this one out! Dawn and Gaige in Pre-K. They were so little!! Where did the time go?

Of course there are pictures of my monkey nephew! Cutest little goober on earth o what?! Sporting his Bears apparel naturally. ;)

What kinds of things do you keep? Do you try to keep as much as possible or as little? Are you a memorabilia nut like me?