decluttering challenge

I was inspired by this mom's blog and have been trying to follow her path, although I have not been photographing my outflow, and sometimes I have forgotten to count it, too.  Mostly I have been counting things in terms of bags, as in "threw away 8 bags of suspicious bulk bin items that I could not remember purchasing and suspected might have gone rancid."  Yesterday, I got fed up with my packed-to-the-gills car and cleaned it out.  I had finally made my home the happy, clean place that it deserves to be, and therefore there was a place to put a minivan worth of stuff.  I have enjoyed sorting and cleaning that out; my husband swept out the car; I bought and labeled two crates for things that are going back in (like water toys, sand toys, blankets to sit on - things like that).  It feels so much nicer in there, and now when someone helps me carry heavy bags of groceries and such, I won't cringe when I open the car door.  I am proud to note that there was only one grocery bag worth of miscellaneous trash, and none of it was of the gross fast food variety - mostly the free paper that my son likes to pick up from our driveway, or half-done art projects from Discovery Days - things like that.  Clean trash. 

After the big cleanout, I had a big Hefty Jumbo Bag full of donations (shoes, clothes, tablecloths, etc.), and on our way to a park playdate today, we put it in the charity drop bin.  It was such a good feeling to get all that stuff out of my house and onto its next stage.  All of it was in good shape - just unneeded.  I also didn't realize, until I was trying to put things in bins, how many sand toys we had.  I made an initial pass to try to clear things out and realized that we had 12 shovels and 4 rakes in that bin.  Who needs 12 shovels?  How did I acquire all that without noticing?  I didn't donate those, since I didn't see someone else passionately desire a scratched and used plastic shovel.  I left one in the sand toy bucket and moved the others to our outdoor toys here.  I won't be buying shovels for years and years...  I have stopped being able to take sand toys to the park since Spencer has such a hard time sharing them, and we are pretty much always at the park with friends or with the Luna Moms, so sharing is a required activity.  I am debating about putting them in the car at all; maybe that is just wasted space?  And the water toys could just go in when we know we are going to the pool...  I am debating.  There is not endless space back there, in spite of what I might think. 

We have set our c-section date - our new baby will be here on August 4 at 7:15 a.m., barring complications.  That's not very far away; I am 30 weeks pregnant today; and I have a lot of things to get rid of and work to do before the baby gets here or there won't be room in the house for him.  It will be an adjustment, but of course it will be fantastic.  And we could clearly stand to have a lot less stuff anyway.