Keepsake Decluttering: Husband's First Bin

Now that my youngest daughter has reduced her keepsakes from two bins down to one, I decided to tackle one of my husbands bins. Have you noticed I'm doing the rest of the family's bins first? Procrastinating my own a bit I think.

The great news is that we found five items to let go of from the bin below! How does one write sarcasm? Really. Only five items at this point. 

That bin is pretty large. At least double what each of those smaller bins the girls each had. The deal with this bin is that it has a lot cards and letters. And they are mostly from me. The picture below shows those that were written by me. A shoe box sized bin and a large mailing envelope stuffed full. My husband and I had a lot of times apart early on in our relationship and we wrote letters to each other. I'm guessing most, but not all, of them aren't super meaningful now.

As I opened the bin up, I realized that I had been through these items before. I had even grouped cards he received from graduation, a deployment, an old friend and former boss. All identified and wrapped with a rubber band. 

My husband briefly looked at it all. He said, "I already went through this one before". Yes. True. I asked about certain items, such as a middle school year book. "Sure. Keep. Why not?" 

I didn't question him at the time because I was intending to work on this myself and have a clear pile of toss and save items. He was working on a class and I didn't want to disturb him. So because he is busy, this bin is staying as is for now. It's the pile of cards and letters from me that need the most attention. And I think he needs to do that part, or at least together. 

There are two graduation hats, three tassels for them and an honors cord. My gut says these can go, too. I need to see if I still have mine. Maybe we'll toss ours together!

Even though we didn't actually declutter more than five pieces of paper from this bin during the first session, we know what is in there. We know that most of it still is considered keepsakes. We also know there are an abundance of cards and letters to tackle at some later date (preferably still this month). I'm fine with calling it progress. 

Year to date decluttering was 495. Now 500! A nice even number at least.