Now you see it …

Some parents celebrate their children’s growth using hash marks on a door frame. Others marvel – or weep – at the increasing heft and strength of their little one each time he or she leaps into their arms.

I celebrate my children’s growth every time I get to throw something out.

It’s not that I lack any sense of nostalgia for days gone by, when their little heads smelled like Johnson & Johnson’s lavender baby wash (God, I could drink that stuff) and every precious babble and coo were captured on video. It’s just that very small human beings necessitate the ownership of a HUGE AMOUNT OF EXTRA CRAP around the house. And I am not a big fan of extra crap around the house. Just ask my sister, who panicked earlier this summer when I mentioned I was having a garage sale.

“What are you selling??” she asked in an accusatory tone, mentally calculating how quickly she could drive to my house in PA from her house in NY and chain herself to all of my junk, because my de-cluttering urge is matched only by her need to keep everything. “Well, I’ve decided to keep the couch, and the children,” I smirked. And I meant it.

So you can imagine how happy I was last night when I went in to check on the teeth-brushing progress of my 5-year-old, Evan, and noticed that he was not using the bathroom stool, which he had always, until that very moment, used. I pointed this out to him, and he turned toward me with more pride on his face than an entire rainbow-filled parade.

I of course made a huge deal about such a momentous milestone, with high-fives and a giant hug and an “Oh my goodness, when did you get so big?!” He ran to tell his brother the news that he had suddenly, somehow, in one afternoon become tall enough to stand at the sink, while I stood in the bathroom doorway, the stool already in my hands, plotting my next move. YESSSSS!, I thought. After almost five years we can finally lose this stupid stool that takes up one-fifth of our bathroom floor and is perpetually stained with muddy footprints and toothpaste drippings!

That’s when they both bounded back into the bathroom and looked at me in horror.

“Mommy! What are you doing with the stool?!”

“Nobody needs it anymore!” I sing-songed gleefully. “We can probably give it to a family with little, little kids who still need help reaching things.” Stressing generosity rarely works with my children; I’m not sure why I keep trying it.

“But WE still need it!” Kostyn said emphatically, naming literally everything in the house they still can’t reach – much of which is up that high specifically to prevent them from doing so. I could tell they were digging in on this issue, and no amount of reasoning with them about how a 6-inch-high stool could not help them reach the basket of extra batteries Mommy keeps on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet was going to work.

So I took a deep breath and considered my other de-cluttering victories – I mean their growth milestones! – in recent months.

• The last toddler bed. And getting rid of the toddler bed meant getting rid of the corner of the toddler bed, which loved to find my shin bone very suddenly and forcefully in the dark.
• The Learning Tower, which I had loved using in the kitchen when they wanted to help me bake, but which took up roughly the same square footage as the average NYC apartment.
• The child-sized potty seat, which had been grossly dangling from its handle attached to the toilet for a longer stretch than I can even remember changing diapers, and which reeked of pee no matter how many times I disinfected it.
• The childproof lock on the under-the-sink cabinet, which had prevented only me from retrieving every cleaning product I ever needed.
• Evan’s booster seat, which I was way more excited about chucking until I unlocked it from the chair it had been strapped to for three years and found this wreckage.
  

  How can one small seat do this much damage?

Satisfied that Operation: Get This Extra Crap Out Of My House, Because We Need More Room For Transformers, Apparently is generally moving forward, I agreed to tuck the stool into the hallway closet for whenever they need it to reach something. Later that night I brushed my teeth with a satisfied grin, marveling at how much more real estate I have in there. In fact the only thing left on the bathroom floor is the giant, contoured plastic cup I use at bath time. It is currently tucked discreetly behind the pedestal sink.

But not for long.