The numbers in my closet

18.  1.  4.  5 1/2.  3.  11.  7.


I bent over to wipe the macaroni and cheese off my floor and my favorite pair of jeans ripped in places you can't patch. It totally ruined my day. How crazy that a single insignificant piece of clothing can shift my mood.

It was my only pair of pants that fit. I almost cried.

Since my first baby was born I've been getting dressed out of plastic tubs that store clothing in a variety of sizes. Perpetually gaining/losing weight the past three years with pregnancies and post pregnancy weight loss regimes, nothing seems to fit for an extended period of time. Day after day, pulling clothes out, trying them on and throwing them back; It's exhausting. And it tends to leave my closet a bit of a mess.

I trudged up the stairs in hopes of finding another pair of pants from one of the tubs that line my closet. Still in disbelief at my misfortune I protested, "They weren't even tight!" as I rounded the corner into my bedroom. On the floor in front of me lay mounds of pants, some I'm ashamed to admit, still don't fit after 15 months of post pregnancy. I was struggling to find something, anything, to wear. I began to fold and organize. And two hours later, I'd organized the entire closet. Ahhh.  I could breathe again. I still didn't have pants that fit, but I had an organized closet.

Upon tackling this task I cleaned out a lot of stuff. Stuff that had been packed away or sitting for years, untouched. I got rid of a lot of it. Here's a few things of interest I  found:

18 bras I'll never wear again. As I held them up they looked like training bras to me. (Training bras you buy at Victoria Secret.) They looked like new, too. No wires poking out the sides, no stretched out straps. To think I was able to go nearly 3 weeks without having to duplicate. Now I'm lucky if I can go 3 days.

9 pairs of shoes that no longer fit. My last cortisone shot encouraged me to bid all those 5 inch heels and pointy toed shoes goodbye for good. I now have one pair of running shoes and one pair of crocs. My husband now owns more shoes than I do. (To think I moved a rather large rubbermaid tub home from college filled to the brim, and then some, with just shoes)

10 oversized bags.

11 bottles of red OPI fingernail polish. Eleven! All shades of red.

30-ish pieces of honeymoon lingerie and their matching underwear (if you can call it that) way too small to keep, but at the same time it's all so tiny it barely takes up any space.

Along those same lines,

12 bikinis that haven't seen the sun since 2004. The tops are so small they literally vanish if you crumple them into a ball.

3 heating pads

1 Emerald green dress I wore to my brother's wedding, size 4P. Ah to wear a size 4 again. ( I know that's large for some of you). I squeezed into this right after I was diagnosed with celiac and as I was gaining those dreaded 30 pounds. The wedding was in August, I bought the dress the second week of July and by the fourth, I could barely zip it. :(

and,

1 perfectly preserved wedding dress. (which I did keep)


Master closet, check!







Sarah