**I've bagged up a lot of shoes to recycle tomorrow. Hopefully we remember to take them. I should toss them into the car while I am thinking about it.

**I was feeling very low-energy yesterday so didn't do a whole lot. I made some fruit smoothies for an energy boost.

**Dh was out of town, so I figured a car cleaning would make sense - lots of room in the garage. I just vacuumed out the van and tossed some trash. Was not a lot, but it looks MUCH better. The kids had been hoarding packets of sugar in the back (like, restaurant packets). I don't know what the heck. Always interesting finds with kids.

**While in the garage a bit I cleaned up a bit. There wasn't a lot, but a few old toys to toss and little bits of trash strewn around the garage.

The strangest find? The neighborhood kid had put this cute sprinkler thing across our driveway one day and I spotted them at Walgreens for maybe $7. I was very tempted, but for whatever reason resisted. Thought maybe I would keep on eye for summer or whatever. So I am tossing a few things in the garage and I come across this sprinkler thing in our garage. I set it out and at some point the kid came by. I asked if it was his and he said no because his was another color.

Seriously!?! Where in the heck did this thing come from? I SO do not remember ever buying it.

I am relieved I had not bought a second one.

**After all that I took a nap and made dinner and didn't get a whole lot else done.

**Oh, and dh found my MP3 player in the car. WOOT!! This should help immensely with the kitchen work. Music will make the time go faster. I am hoping to make some progress on the kitchen today - does not have to be a lot. I still have next weekend to finish the job and to beat my personal deadline.

I think I am going to scale back on the house cleaning and relax after May (upstairs in the Fall?). But I think I could probably do another run through. For example, I mentioned all the vases I have. I need to go through those and purge some, but it will easier to start with a clean slate. Right now I might have 7 or 8 bags earmarked for Goodwill (dh has a pile of books and toys and games of such, in addition to whatever I have found in the kitchen). So once those are gone and the cabinets are all scrubbed I may go through again. I am sure I passed up a lot of stuff because it was overwhelming. & this is why I every time I do this I find more stuff. I want to be more thorough this round. !! I've got all summer to be more thorough, in small chunks.

**Taking inventory of the garage: Not a lot in there, as I though. BUT, we were saving bags of soda bottles for someone or something. For the school? I don't know. We will toss into our recycle bin over the next few weeks and clear some space. In fact, maybe I should just take a load to work (we have a "recycle" dumpster). This should clear up some space for bikes and such.

**Speaking of the neighbor kids(s) - the sprinkler thing I mentioned above...

There's this new kid down the street who is 7 - an only child I suppose. I swear he comes by our house every single day with some brand new toy he wants to show off.

???

From a child standpoint, I honestly don't even understand "Keeping up with the Joneses." Some other newer neighbors have some electric scooters that BM is always riding. The next door neighbor has some cool bike thing that all the kids are always riding, and the across the street neighbor has an electric car for his live-in Grandson. So the neighborhood kids are always out riding his electric car around. This week it was walkie talkies and "slip and side" with the "new toy every day" kid.

So why would we buy anything for the kids??? Peer pressure, I guess? A feeling to contribute?

I suppose the downside will be when one day our kids breaks someone's fancy toy. But, until that day... Yesterday our house provided sprinklers and water gun water for the play time. Which means all the kids were in front of our house though we have no fancy toys to boast. I didn't think a lot about it at the time, but it is kind of funny if you think about it. Water from the faucet versus the $500 toy car. I suppose we contributed after all.