Board Games Be Gone

Today our board game shelves lost some weight. To be exact, our games shelves are actually 28 board games lighter than they were yesterday.

With school starting up for the kids in just a couple days, today was spent in cleaning and organizing mode. We worked together and took it one room at a time. One person vacuuming, one person dusting, and a couple people gathering items scattered about. Our goal was to be able to go to bed tonight feeling settled – ready to start the next chapter in our lives.

Starting school each year has such a cleansing feeling. Kids get a new teacher (or many new teachers once they hit junior high and high school), new books and notebooks, a new group of classmates, and a clean slate of things to learn. So why not start everything fresh around the house as well.

Working all together we moved through the house pretty quickly – alternating who had which task in each room. Once we were done the kids were off to play with friends and my wife and I finished up the organizing portions. It didn’t take long before I found myself before our board game shelves and taking thoughtful looks at the games that don’t get played any more. And I knew it was time for these games to move on.

With our youngest being 9 years old, it’s a great time to pass some of our board games suited for young children on to other families. So I started rattling through the board games and soon had about 16 kids games in the departure stack. Then I took another pass over the games and pulled out 12 more that haven’t spent time at the game table for a very long time and most likely won’t any time soon.

Then I split the games into 2 piles – one pile of games to donate at the local charity center and the other pile of games to try to sell first. Either way, we hope the games will end up with families that will love playing them. We’ve enjoyed playing the games and now it’s time for others to enjoy them.

We’ve done the same with clothing over the years as the kids outgrow them. First they get passed down the line of siblings and then they get passed on to others. Well, we find the same thing happens with board games. Some games we simply outgrow.

And that’s ok.

Just because we’ve enjoyed something in the past, doesn’t mean we have to hold on to that thing forever. We’ll keep the memories, but say good bye to the stuff.