STUFF

Young kids are small and generally don’t take up a lot of space however their STUFF sure does. No one told me that when you have 2 young children, not only do you need a bed, a crib, a couple of dressers, a bookcase etc. but you also have to dedicate half of your living room and garage to storing multiple strollers (a BOB, a double stroller, a fold up), a swing, multiple exer-saucers, activity tables, many boxes of clothes, tricycles, wagons, and scooters.

Prior to having our two daughters (Charlotte 3 and Abby 7 months), we lived in a San Francisco apartment that had 3 small closets so moving into a home in Novato with 3 times as much storage and a 2 car garage was storage Shangri Lai. My wife Amie had already begun to acquire baby and kid related STUFF while she was pregnant with Charlotte. Apparently people really like it if you take stuff off their hands. They’ll often give it to you free and sometimes even drop it off. I now see why.

Once Charlotte began to outgrow her infant and toddler clothes, toys and crib – everything eventually accumulated on one side of our garage. If you needed to get to something from that side of the garage, it was like playing a game of Tetris as you moved and restacked boxes and oddly shaped objects to clear a path. Any attempt at organizing the garage was an exercise in futility. I always like to say that I’m up against the First Law of Thermodynamics which I’m pretty sure states that no stuff is created or destroyed – it just gets moved around.

Finally, I caved and got a storage unit. Now that I’ve got one, its $66 a month I consider well spent for a couple of reasons. It provides more room to put our STUFF and most importantly, trips there with 3 year Charlotte is some of the best Father/Daughter time we spend. She loves it and it’s one of her favorite things to do. First, we get to drive there in our VW Van and she’s a huge fan of the van. When we get there, we to go into the office and get a wheeled cart and she gets a lollipop which couldn’t make her more excited. Next, we load up the cart with our STUFF and squeeze Charlotte on there as well and go inside which requires entering a passcode to access the building. One of Charlotte’s favorite hobbies is pressing buttons so keying in a 7 number code is about as exciting as it gets. Once we’re inside, we’ve got to take an elevator up the 2nd floor so you know what that means. Bonus buttons! Once we reach the unit and open it up, it’s like Christmas morning for her as she’s reunited with all of her old pink plastic horsey and shopping cart. Her toys keep her occupied while I search for and swap out the STUFF. If she’s lucky, we need to make more than one trip which means more buttons and more cart rides.

At the end of the day I’m usually bringing home as much STUFF as I brought – remember the First Law of Thermodynamics – but at least it makes me feel like I’m winning the battle against the STUFF and reclaimed some of our garage back while spending some quality time with my daughter.