Xylophones and Pinckneyville: Crossing things off the bucket list

Downsizing is an incredible amount of work! 

I suppose one could simply rent a dumpster and empty the contents of their house into said dumpster and call it a day. But even that would take a bit of work (unless one also hired workers to carry the contents of the house to the dumpster for them). We don't have the luxury of a dumpster—and doing something like that would eat away at my conscience forever—so we've had to figure out what to do with everything. 

We took a load of old paint cans to be recycled here. We took old electronics to be recycled there. We took 20-year-old towels to the animal shelter. We took dozens of loads of stuff to goodwill. We've given away a billion items on the Buy Nothing Group. We left a bread machine in the kitchen for a friend who is in Mexico until after we leave. We meticulously disassembled our broken organ and snuck it piece by piece into the church dumpster over a number of weeks. We sold a few things. And yesterday we took all our glass to the park to recycle it.

*****

Years ago—in 2022—we got a case of ginger beer for Christmas. We kept the bottles so that Miriam could make a xylophone. By October 2023 she still had not done this, but she did manage to smash an entire box of said bottles on the cement floor of the basement while we were recovering from the Great Flood of 2023. That experience must have really taken the wind out of her sails because the rest of the jars sat for another nearly three years. 

I came very close to simply loading them up to take them out to recycle but then I thought to myself, "Come on! It will take all of two minutes to make a xylophone!"

So I grabbed the cracked funnel (that we haven't tossed yet but which we knew we weren't going to pack halfway around the world with us) and filled those bottles with varying levels of water. 

Boom—xylophone done! 

Extremely scientific. 

If I had wanted to take more time on this project we could have used a tuner to get actual notes. Or I could have used a larger variety bottles to make it trickier to know what order they would go in (though we did throw in an experimental bottle or two into this activity). Or, I suppose we could have done any number of things.

After holding onto these bottles for, oh, four years, however, I was simply proud of us for doing anything with them at all (aside from smash them on the floor). 

Alexander had the most fun playing with them, I think. 

That or he was the one to most deftly humour me... 

I scrambled the bottles around and had him put them back in order. He explored different ways of making sounds. We even blew into them and noted that while the fullest bottle was deepest when struck it made the highest pitched sound when blown into (we haven't quite talked about why that was, but there's time for that). 

Once the kids had had their fill with the xylophone (which didn't take long because clearly they weren't interested in this project, if the amount of time they sat collecting dust in the basement is any indication) we really did gather up all the jars and headed over to the park so we could recycle them.

This part of the project—chucking them into the metal collection bin and waiting to hear them shatter at the bottom—was much better received and all the kids seemed to enjoy it immensely.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a beautiful day for playing at the park—much cooler than it has been for a while and quite overcast, so we weren't just out there baking on the playground. Phoebe was overjoyed we were going to stay and play at the park (because usually we choose pool over park in the summer). But first I had to move the car because I was parked in the "glass drop off only" section of the lot.

The kids were very impressed when I simply backed up across the lot into a spot behind me (like a boss):

With our car properly parked, we were free to explore the parks ourselves. Phoebe wanted to visit them all and I think we did spend at least a few minutes at every park (on this side of Pinckneyville). We were on a bit of a tight timeline because we had to get home for this awesome art camp we've been doing in the afternoons, but we still managed to have fun. 

And I can't believe we're at the point where we're checking off "one last visit to..." items off our bucket list! But we're only a week out, so it's very possible that this was our last trip to Pinckneyville (or at least this side of Pinckneyville).

As I also mentioned, we had a big (surprise) storm the night before, so the park was filled with wonderful puddles, which the children took full advantage of.

Phoebe certainly spent the most time enjoying these puddles.

These pictures are from what the kids call "The Train Park" (since there's a little train engine feature to the left of Phoebe's head):

This is from "The Red Park":

This is from "The Spider Park" (there are a bunch of web things for the kids to climb on, but evidently I didn't take pictures of those things today):

And this is from "The Purple Park":

Look how brave and happy Phoebe looks going down that slide:

The baseball complex loop (the side we visited) is about 1.2 miles long. Here are the kids just coming out of the woods at the end of it:

We took our family photos here in 2019:

It's wild to see how those kids have grown (and/or flown the nest and/or joined the family) in the past six years!