Mom of Three Counts Out Loud as She Pulls 100 Things From Her Playroom While Her Big Kids Are Out, Keeps Both Toy Shopping Carts for Her Baby and Decides the Couch Is Going

Standing in her kitchen in a pink top and matching shorts, the mom of three behind @lifewithmadisonm gives herself a number before she walks into the playroom. “I’m going to get rid of at least 100 items in there today,” she says, and she is doing it “while my big kids are not here.”

The clip is labeled on screen “decluttering part 3: (Play room),” and she opens it with the bigger project: “I’m working on decluttering my entire house.” Then the camera turns to the room. Toys cover a floral rug from the gray couch to the window, with a pink dollhouse set, bins and baskets in the middle of it. “Here’s what we’re working with,” she says. “I know it’s a mess.”

Her method takes one clear plastic bin with a lid and a count out loud. Every item she drops in gets a number, and the number shows on screen as she goes. The first ten go fast: small balls and loose pieces pulled from a wicker basket beside the couch.

She slows down at the Barbie accessories. “My daughter loves little bitty tiny things for her Barbies right now,” she says, holding up two dolls with tangled hair, “and actually some of this is my stuff whenever I was a kid.” She tidies that pile and takes only a few things out of it. “These were all of mine, so I can’t blame her for loving tiny stuff.”

In the low thirties she stops to look around. “Everything is already looking so much better,” she says. A baby doll in a bear hat gets held up to the camera, and its outfits are spared: “We’re gonna keep her clothes.” She opens a bag her daughter filled (“my daughter loves packing a million things”), then sits cross legged on the floor to go through “another basket of items,” still counting.

The hardest call in the video is a pair of red toy shopping carts. “Things like this that are hard for me, because we do not need two shopping carts,” she says, kneeling between them. Her reason for keeping both is her youngest: “My baby, he’s only seven months, but I know when he’s like one he’ll want to push this around.” Her ruling: “Keeping them both.”

From 40 on, the count moves through the play kitchen corner and into the bin a handful at a time: plastic play food, white balls, doll pieces. The numbers get shaky. In the seventies she says, “I can’t remember what number I’m on,” and tells the camera the room “looks worse than it really is” in the middle of the sort.

At number 80 she stops over something she says cannot be repaired. “Makes me so sad. There’s no way we can fix this,” she says, and it gets a number. Then she heads for the staircase.

Upstairs changes the math. “I did it, and you’ll never believe it. I found more toys upstairs.” Of one find she says, “My daughter has been looking for these.” Another gets a number: “This camera is broken.” She drops more into a clear bin in a hallway, passes a wall of picture book ledges, and the count on screen climbs through the nineties.

Her spoken count reaches 97 as she stands behind the gray couch. “Kind of thinking about getting rid of the couch,” she says. The last line of the video is “The couch is going.” Her caption puts the final tally at “over 100 things today in our playroom,” says she probably needs to get rid of 100 more, and sets the rule for the rest of the house: “I’m going through every room, cabinet, drawer, closet, etc until the clutter is gone & everything has a home!!”

For a mom who wants to run the same session, set the number before you go in, as she does with 100, and time it for when the older kids are out of the house. Use one container and count single items, tiny ones included. If you lose your place, do what she does in the seventies: pick a number (“we’re just gonna consider this 75”) and keep moving.

Give every keep a reason you can say out loud. The second shopping cart stays because she names who will use it and when: the baby, at about a year old. With a sentimental pile, such as her own childhood Barbie pieces, thin it out instead of clearing it. Before you call the total, walk the other floors for strays, as she does when she goes upstairs and finds more toys to count.