Results of 40 Bags in 40 Days

In my goal to rid ourselves of "forty bags in forty days," I ended up donating away 16 bags plus what I consider 8 "bags' worth" of furniture for which I found new homes: for a total of 24 bags. I also threw away or recycled a lot of stuff that could not be useful to anyone. So, it wasn't a full 40 bags, but it was still useful spiritually, as are all our devotions even when we don't achieve perfection or our original goal (or we get waylaid by unforeseen things, like the children's many illnesses and my husband's degree of travel during Lent!).

I had a huge Rubbermaid bin full of baby hats for both genders and in all sizes. Many infant outfits come with a hat and I'd received so many hand-me-downs. Yet I tend to have a few favorite hats for a given age and season, I toss one in my purse, and that's what I put on the baby's head. I ended up donating away 31 baby hats and still have a bin full of several summer and winter hats for both genders in sizes newborn through preschooler!

I have not yet had success getting one of my babies to wear bibs, yet I owned about three dozen of them! Now I own just a few of the best ones. You know, to look at in the drawer since all my babies have torn them off.

I found it difficult to throw away my old floppy discs of book manuscripts I had edited when I worked at a publishing house and then ran my own editing business. They are useless to me and useless to anyone ten years later--in fact, if anything they're a liability--and yet so hard to throw away because they represent another life of mine.

I even cleaned out my email in box: I receive so many emails and have a delay on being able to reply to actual important loved ones in my life. So, I began unsubscribing from many advertisement and newsletter emails I receive, which probably reduced my new emails per day by at least a dozen. (Last year I had gone through the purge of removing myself from a lot of interesting and useful Yahoo specialty groups because I simply could not keep up with them all.)