This is us. DD10 and myself are both pseudo-almost-hoarders. My poor DH hates it but has resigned himself.
I put things in storage and periodically look through them to see if I can get rid of some of it. Usually the longer I've kept something the more likely I am to let it go. It's funny because I'll look at an item and think "omg why am I keeping this?" at the same time that I'm remembering that six months ago I HAD to keep it.
Most of our house is pretty normal, but cluttered. My office is chaos, lol.
My daughter's room is... well... awful. (It's clean - I have a VERY strict no food, drinks or pets rule, but it's just crammed with stuff.) We're working at it slowly and there has been progress. Just when I'm feeling optimistic about it, I'll visit a friend and see a "typical" child's room - tidy, minimal stuff, etc., and I start feeling overwhelmed again, lol!
Squishys I can completely relate to your statement: "My babies will never be these ages again; they will never draw, make, or wear these things again." It's so true. I tell myself that I can get rid of some of it, though, and I'm not losing them with the stuff. It's hard though. I know how you feel
DD is particularly strange about her clothes. She wants to keep every article of clothing she's ever worn. I want to hand some stuff down to her cousins, but I can't get her to part with it. If I do it behind her back and she sees her cousins wearing something she used to own, the damage to her trust in me would be massive. So instead I talk with her and reason with her and she'll eventually part with one or two things. There's progress, but it's painstakingly slow.
An upside is that she's made fantastic progress with packaging (from toys, & whatever is new that came packaged). She used to obsessively want to keep every scrap of packing that came with stuff (O.M.G.). Now she's very comfortable about handing
most of it (not all) over to me for recycling. Yay....
