My hopscotch.

As every parent of a young child knows, the size of a child is inversely proportional to the size of the toys that they have. The smaller the child, the larger the toy. We have a small house. It is full of plastic, rubber, foam, paper, cardboard, wood, metal and other unimaginable space age materials in all the colors of the rainbow. My feet are calloused from walking on all sorts of sharp things. My living room is like the scene in Die Hard where Bruce Willis needs to walk across the shattered glass in bare feet. Needless to say, I get a little bent over this from time to time. I declare that it's time to purge.

Purging is no fun, so you need some sort of a system. More importantly, you need commitment from all parties involved. Leave your emotional connection to objects at the door. Just because your adorable baby girl once played with a cute stuffed animal and you will never get that adorable image out of your head doesn't mean you must carry the prop around with you forever. Toss it is what I say. I know it's cold, but you gotta live your life. I like to begin with finding 2 or more objects that are similar and get rid of the lesser favored of the 2. Or anything with any kind of broken part should be tossed. We tend to do this when the children are sleeping. Late at night or possibly nap time. So we rarely have the time. So when we do I like to make quick difficult decisions and hope for the best possible outcomes. Please don't let this random toy be the toy one of my children is about to want to play with.

Which brings me to the hopscotch set. A giant foam puzzle with giant foam pieces that connects to form a giant hopscotch (I think it's called a) court. Let's go through our purging checklist shall we?

1. Do we have other toys like this one? check
2. Are we missing any parts? check
3. Is the carrying case broken? check
4. Does it take up far too much room? check
I feel no need to continue. Into the garbage.

Boy loves garbage trucks. The garbage men love Boy. When Boy hears the truck rumbling down the street he runs to the front door to see the truck and to watch the men throw the garbage into said truck. There he stands, in our full view front door, often only in underwear marveling at the process. The guys always wave. They honk the horn. They stop and make a point of dumping the smaller garbage container on the front of the truck into the back of the truck while boy watches. It's almost like a dumpster on the front of the truck with forklift arms that turn it end over into the main garbage holding area in the back of the truck. It's industrial. It's loud. Boy loves it. I admit it's pretty cool. I assume you know where I'm going by this point.

The giant foam hopscotch set has made it from our garbage barrel into the front dumpster without being noticed. Phew. Moment of truth. The arms slowly lift the front dumpster to unload into the back while Boy stands in awe. In my head, the theme song from 2001: A Space Odyssey is playing. It is all in super slow motion. From the dumpster comes tumbling giant foam pieces in all the colors of the rainbow into the back holding area. Crap. There's no way he's missing this. Boy sadly says, "my hopscotch", in a tone somewhere between statement and question. He is slowly learning that life isn't all cupcakes and cookies. Sometimes it's rough.