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Sparkle (29)
Forget Toddler and Tiaras. We live our own reality show everyday:Hoarding, Katie Edition. I talked briefly about it HERE, so now I'm going to talk about it a bit more.
My daughter might have a hard time forming bonds with her peers, or the actual humans around her, but she has no issue with attaching herself to an inanimate object. Well, not the usual teddy bear or doll. No, those she doesn't really care about and she has never had a "lovey". Instead, she keeps, or tries to keep, practically everything non-toy she has never come into contact with.
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From trash (which she will rescue from the trash or recycling) |
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To boxes that come in the mail, which she then fills with random "stuff" |
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Now this might look innocent, but it's jammed with Valentine's from preschool. Which usually are not neatly tucked inside. She has to keep them all. |
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This is a 2 part hoard. This seat is actually part of a vanity we no longer have. She had to keep the seat to "remember" the vanity by. Recently I found a pint of ice cream stuffed inside (she also hoards food). |
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She also has a year-round, fake Christmas tree, because tossing the real one every January is too much for her to bear. This makes it so that we don't have to "keep" something from the real one. |
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This is just a small sampling of her hoarding. I decided she deserved to keep some of her privacy. Why I also didn't take a full on photo of her room. Or dresser. Or closet. On top of needing to keep everything, she also has no ability to organize anything. Because of this I have gotten a bit more hardcore with getting rid of things. She used to have two really big "collections" of milk bottle tops and paint sample cards. As badly as I did feel getting rid of them, because she was SO attached, the mess was getting out of control. The good thing is that she has stopped collecting the bottle tops, but any trip to the Home Depot or Lowes restocks the paint samples.
It might just sound like a kid collecting crap, but you don't have to wrestle trash from the hands of a typical kid at Disney World because she can't part with the wrappers in which her food came. Typical parents probably don't have to do a sweep of their kid's bedroom to make sure there is no hidden food. Typical parents probably don't need to drag their kid from the home improvement store because she needs more paint cards. You get the gist.
I am not sure how this is going to evolve as she gets older. I am hoping that as she matures she understands that 1)keeping everything isn't necessary or 2)she needs to at least keep things picked up and clean.
I am not sure if this is an Autism thing or just a Katie thing, but it's definitely something we have to deal with on a daily basis. And I've seen the actual Hoarders show....we will NOT be going down that road.
