Temina is excited about taking a trip on an airplane, and super-excited to include ALL of her toys and dolls on the trip as well. Until mom says: "You can bring just ONE doll." Impossible! How is she going to pick just ONE? She hatches a top secret plan and sneaks more than one toy into the airport and onto the plane. While everyone around her gawks, Temina proudly displays her beloved companions. Word spreads quickly to other children on the plane, who feel lonely without their own dolls. Temina is happy to lend out her treasures. The flight becomes a happy memory for Temina and her family, and even more so months later when her generosity is rewarded in the most surprising way!

Marie Kondo is for the birds in this hilarious picture book about expectant magpie parents and the dangers of having too many things! Magpies Meg and Ash want to build the perfect nest for their eggs. They use the usual mud, sticks, and grass, but are soon convinced that it’s not enough! Meg and Ash collect all kinds of things—cuckoo clocks, mops, socks, and more—and put them in an ever-growing pile of what they might need to make a home for their chicks. But as the tower of things grows more and more wobbly, the birds might just find out they have too much stuff!

Are your counters covered with appliances you had to have but rarely use? Are your cupboards stuffed with clothes that you hope to fit back into or that you paid a fortune for but only wore once? Have you been hanging on to that hideous teapot your mother gave you 10 years ago only because she gave it to you? Every time you go shopping do you come back with bags of more stuff because that pillow/blouse/cd/mixer will be the one thing that changes your life and then it doesn't change your life because you have nowhere to put it? In It's All Too Much,organisational guru Peter Walsh challenges you to answer a very simple but scary question: Does the stuff you own contribute to the life you hope to achieve or does it get in the way of your vision? Peter helps you assess the state of your home without any sugar coating and will teach you how to confront and conquer the stuff that is holding you back by identifying the purpose of each and every object in your home and assessing your reasons for holding onto it. He shows you how to identify which room is the heart of your home and then shows you why it is so important to keep that space clean and clear of clutter - if the heart of your home is clogged what does that say about you? He then helps you go room by room to ask the important questions: What is the room? What's its purpose? What is this item? Does it contribute positively to the life you want? The answers to these questions will help you understand your priorities and fix your relationship with your stuff. And in gaining this understanding you can start to clear out the clutter!

"To be human means to need things. Even more human is to need more and more of them. In this engaging, charming book, archaeologist, curator, and writer Chip Colwell takes us around the world, covering topics as wide-ranging as the dawn of tool making, the earliest cave paintings, the complexities of clothing, the Industrial Revolution, the torrent of gizmos invented to bring us closer and supposedly make our lives easier, and, finally, the mountains of unwanted stuff in dumps. Along the way, he raises questions such as: Why is a treasured keepsake sacred to one person but meaningless to another? What do we go through when we clean out the belongings of the dearly departed? And what is the point of storing things in museums? The book is organized around three historical phases: (1) the invention of tools; (2) the dawn of the belief that things mean something beyond their immediate use (around 50,000 years ago); and (3) the Industrial Revolution and the age of mass consumption. Colwell takes us on a tour across millions of years to explain how humans have arrived at this moment-a world that both requires things and is suffering because of them"--

Organize your stuff and maximize your space! This inventive resource shows you how to create a supportive learning environment by setting up clearly-defined spaces and user-friendly storage. Demonstrates ways to reduce clutter, increase teacher efficiency, and make the elementary classroom more inviting. With ideas for the beginning of the year and for any time throughout, this is an excellent resource for both seasoned and novice teachers.

America’s top cleaning expert and star of the hit series Legacy List with Matt Paxton distills his fail-proof approach to decluttering and downsizing. Your boxes of photos, family’s china, and even the kids' height charts aren’t just stuff; they’re attached to a lifetime of memories--and letting them go can be scary. With empathy, expertise, and humor, Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff, written in collaboration with AARP, helps you sift through years of clutter, let go of what no longer serves you, and identify the items worth keeping so that you can focus on living in the present. For over 20 years, Matt Paxton has helped people from all walks of life who want to live more simply declutter and downsize. As a featured cleaner on Hoarders and host of the Emmy-nominated Legacy List with Matt Paxton on PBS, he has identified the psychological roadblocks that most organizational experts routinely miss but that prevent so many of us from lightening our material load. Using poignant stories from the thousands of individuals and families he has worked with, Paxton brings his signature insight to a necessary task. Whether you’re tired of living with clutter, making space for a loved one, or moving to a smaller home or retirement community, this book is for you. Paxton’s unique, step-by-step process gives you the tools you need to get the job done.

Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.