memory archive — day 98

Our recent move made my decluttering progress accelerate. So much that while sorting out things, there wasn’t any time or energy left to sit down and write about it. Diligent as I am, however, I kept on taking photos of the treasured items that had to go; to write about those at a later time. As you can imagine, there were a lot of items affected (It’s ‘now or never’ when you are in a moving house situation.). As I decided a while back to go up to 100 days for my memory archive, I am left with far more items to write about than I have posts left. In my opinion, all of the photographed items deserve a spot in the archive though, therefor I will consolidate them. This post’s topic is animals. Read on if you’d like to find out each individual, little story.If you are thinking all of the following memories are about items that belonged to the kids, you are wrong. Guess which items aren’t!

Top picture, from top left clockwise.

1) From the first moment that I hold this cuddly toy present that we received for our daughter’s birth in my hands, I could only see the sitcom character ALF from the 80s rather than a giraffe. After many years, I slowly grew fond of it, my daughter never really though…

2) I bought the Dumbo popcorn holder at our first visit to Disneyland Tokyo which is now a good three years back. When I was a teenager I visited Disneyland Anaheim with my parents. I was so impressed by it all that I was excited to go and take my daughter to the one in Tokyo. I still really enjoyed it but, of course, the magic I felt back then had vanished. We kept this Dumbo until just before our move. Only then did I realise that Timothy mouse had lost his head, a rather brutal sight.

3) This one is a bit delicate. It came into our household through my partner; a present from his ex-girlfriend. I understood that he wanted to hold on to it but it took some convincing that it maybe should better be moved to a different spot than his bedside table. Once I achieved this, I was fine with the penguin; occasionally teasing my partner about it as he still took good care of it (e.g. taping its worn off flippers) I picked it up again just before our move. It was sitting on the top shelf of his wardrobe at that time. The poor penguin was slowly disintegrating by then. I was surprised when my partner didn’t protest about the prospect of letting it go.

4) This Sheepskin rug is one of those baby items that I found hard to let go. I know I’m not the only one who can get quite sentimental about items that remind you of how quickly time passes and kids grow up…

Bottom picture, from top left clockwise

5) This paw belonged to an adult panda costume, I got for my partner a few years back for a fancy dress birthday party. I think he took it to the party and put it on briefly, however, the head of the panda had only two very small holes for the eyes but nothing to breath through for the nose or mouth. He nearly suffocated inside that costume, hence it was only put on one more time to scare the kids.

6) Those animal backpacks…I wrote about our first one of those a while back. There is only one left in the family now. A monkey. However, I caught my daughter trying to convince her younger brother that it is too ‘babyish’ for him. So let’s see how much longer that will stay in the family for…

7) A rocking horse elk that I once got from a school jumble sale. It was part of the furniture much longer than it probably should have been but I always liked to look at it and it was a nice splash of colour for the living room.

8) This book which helped getting my daughter ready for bedtime stands for all the children’s books that I have read over the years over and over and over again. I’m getting tired just thinking about it…