Saving 8 years of homeschooling papers seemed like a good idea at the time-until I realized how much there actually was. A few weekends ago we did a preliminary cleanout of the attic and discovered that I had 14 boxes of school papers scattered throughout the attic. So I decided to haul them downstairs into the classroom and start going through them.

After 2 days of trying to make the hard decisions of what to keep and what needed to make the trip to the recycling bins I was able to reduced 14 boxes to 5 trash bags for the dump, 4 “not ready to part with yet’ boxes (2  for each kid) and 2 “keeping for posterity” tubs (already had one in the attic for my oldest son).

Maybe in a few years I will be able to go through those 4 other boxes and purge again. For me those papers, notebooks, workbooks were a representation of my children’s hard work through the years, but I am learning that I don’t need to hang onto everything. My kids are the better representation of their accomplishments.