<p>Ha…my S has the daily contacts which he routinely stretches for longer than a day…he says “if you’re staying up pretty much all night, what difference does it make?”<br>
His junk is still piled in heaps in his room. He is leaving Saturday to move into his first college apartment (one year in the dorm was all he could stand despite my pleading to stay one more year). He says there is no point in picking it up all his stuff when it will all be thrown into the back of his car in a couple of days!</p>
<p>The scariest part of all this stuff coming home is that I don’t think a lot is going back in August! My daughter had a really big single this year with plenty of room for the refrigerator, 20" TV, rolling food cart, vaccuum, two dish chairs, floor lamp, floor fan, DVD’s (where did all of those come from???), 4 storage bins (I KNOW she didn’t start the year with those), microwave, to say nothing of the clothes, clothes and more clothes. Next year she moves into a sorority house - a very small, crowded triple. Most of that stuff will be staying behind…and living in my house! I’m trying to downsize and empty stuff out and her stuff just seems to be growing mysteriously all by itself. How does that happen?</p>
<p>My older kiddos had strict instructions (since we live in a shoe!) that they were to locate, rent, pack, and move their school belongings into a secure storage facility nearby their respective schools. They could bring home 2 suitcases and computer stuff, what they would need for the summer. Some of them do have other destinations besides home in their summer so they sent their necessary stuff ahead of time to those other locations vis USPS. So we kept the 2 pieces of luggage rule. After 4+ years it is still in effect. One got crafty and shipped 1 box ahead of time but now she is down to 1 piece of luggage. Granted I am sure she will make it her BIGGEST piece of luggage the airlines will allow.</p>
<p>Or she could pay extra to the airline and bring home an ENORMOUS piece of luggage, hmmmmmmmmmm.</p>
<p>My oldest son is a neat freak, so he enforces “the nothing sits in the hallway, entryway, garage, bathroom, attic rule”. With as many kids as I have, he makes life very doable around here!!</p>
<p>Kat</p>
<p>A couple of years ago my younger son (then 13) came home from sleepaway camp, and dumped his trunks in the garage. He unpacked all all the clothes and important stuff (cds, dvd, etc.) but left the 1/2 filled bag there, in a corner of the garage, despite my reminders every day when we passed it to get moving on putting it away. If there was something he needed that he thought was still in there (ie pool shoes), he’d go down & search it out. After many months, he finally said that he wasn’t delayed in putting stuff away, he was getting a head start on the next summer’s packing. PS. He didn’t go back to camp the next summer, and it was well into the following fall that we finally got the stuff out of there!</p>