the insanity continues

I am still working on eliminating weight in preparation of our upcoming move to Germany. This week I decided to go through all the boardgames (including cards, dominoes, puzzles and the like) to see which ones were missing pieces....ummm, like all of them.

We had 5 boxes of games when we arrived in Jakarta. I don't mean 5 individual boxes with one game each, like a monopoly game in it's own box, a scrabble game, a sorry game...I mean we had 5 big moving boxes full of board games, plus I found board games tucked here and there in among the other boxes. In fact we have 4 different versions of scrabble, 2 sorry games, 2 different monopolies, 2 identical twisters and more kids games than I care to think about, especially since we hardly ever seem to play any of the games.

How did we get so many games? Birthday parties, impulse shopping, forgetting I already had a (blank) game... On top of that back when I had a paying job teaching elementary school (SAHM is 24-7 with lots of love, but little money) I bought lots of games for centers and rainy day recess activities, when I quit those all came home with me. Now we have too many games.

So this week I decided to tackle the cabinets in the play room where I keep most (oh... ok...some) of the games. This is a before picture of one of the cabinets. I didn't get an after picture, more on that later. This seemed like a straight forward enough process, if the game is missing pieces and can't be played, throw it away! But wait, I have kids, lots of kids, they carry stuff off everywhere! What if I throw a game away this week and next week when I go through the upstairs closets I find the missing pieces? Then I will have thrown away a perfectly good game. So now I have a pile of games sitting there waiting for me to find the missing pieces. I put this pile in one cabinet and the games that are ready to be played (why do these all have broken taped together boxes...uugh!) in the other cabinet. See I can be organized!!

So far so good but then I decided to actually brush my teeth and comb my hair before nap time. Outrageous, I know. When I came back to the playroom there was my precious little monster sitting happily in a mountainous pile of puzzle pieces and assorted game tokens. It only takes 5 minutes to brush my teeth and hair, probably less. How could he cause that much damage in such a short period of time???? I didn't even get a picture of the organized cabinet.

Sigh..I give up. I am going to go to the grocery store, pray it isn't a durian day (more on that later) and deal with the mess another time. If I am lucky Dwi will have put it up before I get home. Of course she doesn't play any of these games so she will just shove the pieces any old place but it will look clean and tidy, at least until you open a box to play.