Open any closet in our house, and you’ll find them. “Grab bags:” grocery sacks filled with every imaginable type of household item. Broken toys, outgrown clothes, half-opened mail, single earrings, preschooler artwork, outlet covers, birthday candles, orphaned socks, business cards– all chucked into bags in hurried anticipation of company.  Not only do they eliminate the need for costly maids and feng-shui clutter consultants, but the bags also give you the illusion of a manageable life. Just hurl all your loose crap into the bag, and wow!  The house looks great and your friends think you’re amazing.

Until…you get the call that your electricity’s about to be cut off because you haven’t paid the bill. Bill? What bill?  Uh-oh! Grab bags!

A few years back, just before our son was born, I went a little grab bag crazy. I was working in the mornings, juggling two architecture projects under construction, and caring from my toddler daughter from 11 a.m. to bedtime.  As I waddled nearer to my C-section date, I tried to get things ‘squared away.’ For me this meant several things. Like making sure clients and contractors had everything they needed before my maternity leave. And setting up a guest bedroom for our relatives, who were coming to help me dodge another bout of postpartum depression. It also meant putting everything without a pulse into grab bags. Unholy numbers of them, as we tried to make a clean(er) tableau for our newborn son, and all the family members coming to our aid.

Stashing grab bags in a closet (or the pantry, or the shower, or the empty dryer, or the car) is an awesome idea if company’s only visiting for the day. But for overnight guests, such as those we had for a month after my son’s birth, we needed each of our home’s cavities to store luggage and dop kits. So my husband and I moved all the grab bags to the office we share over our garage (the unheated one, with no bathroom. But that’s another story.)

That’s where we learned the awful truth about our crafty clean-up scheme. Grab bags reproduce, just like us.

Four years later, I’m still going through the bags from that busy spring, and since. They’ve devoured a quarter of our office’s square footage. Sure, I’ve rifled through some of the bags in the intervening years, usually in hot pursuit of a utility bill (I’ve been burned too many times by eBills to go that route). But actually sorting the contents of our bulging flock of grocery sacks has remained one of the most daunting items on my to-do list.

In the early days of my guerrilla tidying, I’d chuck anything inside a grab bag. Now, six years into parenting, I’ve established a few ground rules to protect my sanity and credit rating.  No bills, and no car registration stickers. No food or tupperware. No diapers, no matter how unused they appear. No mixing home and work items. And all grab bags must be elevated to at least four feet above floor level to avoid certain looting by preschoolers.

These rules have helped minimize grab bag-induced stress, and have spared me more fun-kay and fuzzy discoveries of the worst kind. But they can’t diminish the pang of reuniting with forgotten toys and construction-paper love notes from my children. Because grab bags, as it turns out, are also time capsules of our lives in the weeks and months before an important family event. Such as our daughter’s birthday party, with its fifteen inbound guests in need of a clean surface for their cake plates.  Among the chip clips and dead AA batteries in this particular bag, I found a list of instructions for a babysitter. I’d outlined things my husband and I knew by heart about our children but had to spell out for the uninitiated. When I read the note, I realized how many facets of our daily routine have shifted in only a few months’ time. “Joe,” I said, “remember how we had to tell E to do a pee-pee check every twenty minutes, especially during a video?” For months while he potty-trained, we reminded him dozens of times each day. Then he learned to remember. And we forgot.

I like to think it’s hard to face the grab bags because of the sorting. But more than that, it’s the realization that my memory can’t hold everything that happens in our chock-full days. Maybe It’s not all worth remembering, but honestly, most of it is. If I toss the deflated balloon from the children’s museum, will I remember the good time we had there? I take my chances and let it go. But I keep the directions for the sitter. And all the drawings and love notes.

My daughter lost her grip on a pink helium balloon one windy day in 2007, and we all watched it disappear into the sky.  I take a lesson from her—of how she wailed over the lost balloon, and then got upgraded to a mylar Hello Kitty number.  The story remains one of our most-beloved family keepsakes.