Need the ladies' perspectives on something...

A few of you may remember my wife passed away 2 years ago. As a widower with 3 kids at home and a business to run (50% owner) I don't have the time to do much of anything outside what is required to keep the house running.

Long story short, we had some damage from Hurricane Michael last year that we are finally getting around to dealing with. Nothing catastrophic inside the house, and we've been living there the whole time, but while fixing what was damaged I had the opportunity to update some things that needed it. In replacing the interior doors we had to remove all contents from the closets...and now you might know where I'm going. I have boxes and boxes of "stuff" my wife kept from when the kids were little, you know the stuff...clothes, pre-K hand turkeys, honor roll certificates, etc. I know most of it CAN be thrown out, but what sort of criteria do you use to determine what SHOULD be tossed? My son will say dump it all, my younger daughter (16) will probably say she doesn't care, and my older daughter (18 and in college now) will find a reason to keep some of it. Bottom line...I don't want to throw out something I/they will wish they had in 10 years, but I'm not so stupid as to realize that is a complete guess.

And thanks in advance. We know what kind of responses GD would have.

Have them present when it happens. No regerts later! 😉

Funny you mention that...I already asked if they wanted the school certificates and they all said toss them.

Im late to the party but I can personally relate to this. I am a child who lost her mom very early. My father was very busy with his job and never spent time with me. When I cleaned out his home after he passed away I found a huge mess. He saved basically every piece of paper from his entire life down to paystubs from his first job at age 14. What I didn’t find was anything from my school days. That hurt. It didn’t mean anything to me when I was a teenager that my father never showed up to any of my school functions, but it does now. (I’m not suggesting this is you) My advice is save some things. As we age and mature we have a different perspective.

I make a 1” binder for my kids each year, keeping a lot of the cute stuff and tossing the worksheets and such.  It consolidates the mess and I figured they would be more likely to look at it down the road if it’s a binder vs papers in a box.  

After my parents passed I inherited a few boxes of my own school stuff.  Nearly everything went in the trash, but it was like a window back in time going through everything.  Honestly at times it was a little hard, I can understand why your kids might not seem interested in doing that.