Found: Insanity in trash

I seem to be recreating tidy piles of organization today. I'll organize and then, a few minutes later, I'll find myself reorganizing. Insanity? Perhaps. Or perhaps I'm just a mom.

This is what I've heard all day:

Alec excitedly, almost manic with pleasure, yelling, "Mommy! Look at what I just FOUND! It's my favorite. . . um, what is this thing?"

I'm trying to prepare for our moving/garage sale which is scheduled to take place on Saturday. I'm going room by room and making three piles per room: keep, toss, sell. Inevitably, since Alec is shadowing me today, he is constantly rearranging my piles. My toss piles become puddles of treasure to be stacked and turned into kid necessities. (Did you know that a pile of mangled paperclips are not trash? That's what Alec keeps telling me.) My sell piles are, somehow, transporting themselves into other rooms and into pre-designated "keep ALWAYS" locations. For example, a coloring book well past its prime (no non-colored pages remaining) somehow found its way into the bucket for Star Wars treasures. The coloring book moved from my office into the living room. Another sell item, the cardboard "flip a fish" game found its way from the bedroom to the living room and is still in the hands of an eager Alec who has been flipping fish for the past 30 minutes.

I don't know if I'll ever get anything truly accomplished because I seem to be recreating my original piles over and over again. Insanity? No. Some strange compulsion? Not really. Just my defensive garage sale strategy against a way-too-energetic four year old.