Welcome to a slab chems clean the podcast. I am Dana K white. I share my personal D slap vacation process as I figure out ways to keep my own home under control. I share the truth about cleaning and organizing strategies that actually work in real life for real people, people who don't love cleaning and organizing. Thanks for joining me today. This is podcast number three 53. And I think I'm going to call it talking about toys or something like that. Maybe it's something like trending toward minimalism with toys, or the truth about toys, or good luck, Rachel, figuring out what I'm going to call this one. Okay, so I am talking with my friend dawn, she is the YouTuber at the minimal mom. She is also one of my partners in the take your house back course that we have. And she's got younger kids than I do. Her youngest is 8, so. little bitty kids anymore, but when she started her journey toward minimalism, which I'll know I'm not a minimalist, right? Okay, in case you're just finding your way here. But Don is, and she loves minimalism and has really been very helpful for her. And she started her journey when her she had four kids under the age of four, four and under something like that. She talks about it in this interview that we do. And so as we were getting closer to time to be talking about, you know, toys and gifts and gift giving and all that. I thought I'm gonna have her come on because she is in the thick of it and the thing that I love about dawn and I say this in the course of the interview as well. The thing I love about her is she is so like she reads and she researches and she finds this scientific back up to how it is that it affects kids to have too much stuff and how it positively affects them to have less stuff and anyway, so I find that interesting I found that fascinating honestly and I love that Don is so good at that kind of stuff. So have her on, we talk about just toys in general. Like what she did when she was first getting started at the point where she was completely overwhelmed in her home and was like something has to change. What the effects of that was, where they are now on that, how she gives gifts how she approaches her kids getting gifts and family members and all that kind of stuff. We talk about toy rotation and how we both feel about that. You all know how I feel about it, right? But we talk about that. Anyway, so we go into this. So I think it's, yes, it's going to be helpful for people with kids, but I also think it's something to think about if you buy gifts for kids, right? If you have children on your Christmas shopping list, these are things to be considering, not for you to go in and tell the mom of the kids who you're buying gifts for, that they should do things differently. I'm just saying, as you are buying gifts, these are things that can kind of shape your perspective on that. And honestly, it all applies, right? The way it affects kids emotionally and all that kind of stuff, it affects me, too. Just having less stuff, having less to deal with, being able to exercise my creativity, all that kind of stuff. So I think that you're going to enjoy this episode, and before we get into that, I do just want to make sure that you also know that I'm launching my certification soon. Here we go, y'all. I am planning and I say planning because who knows what's going to happen. But the plan is to open pre orders for the training course for decluttering coaches on Monday of Thanksgiving week. That is Monday the 21st, I believe. Okay, check your calendars. So if you want to make sure that you are on the email list to find out about that, I mean, I'm going to send it to my whole newsletter in general, but I will send the detailed information to people who are on this list. You can go to a slab chems clean dot com slash certification. And that will let you sign up for that list. You can also just go to my website and click on decluttering certification. The tab there and it'll take you there to sign up for that. But the way that's going to work is there's going to be a training course, and then after you have completed the course successfully, you can then choose to be certified. So that is an additional cost. So all right, I keep saying so, but there we go. I just wanted to make sure you know about that that that is coming up. So if that's something that you're interested in, maybe you can say I, this is what I want for my Christmas. I don't know. Who knows. So, but let's get to the conversation with Don. Here you go. Hey, Don. We're talking again. I feel like we talk a lot, but it's always fun. Yeah, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you. Yeah. So I've asked you to come on because we're going to talk about toys because this is Christmas time. And people like to talk about toys. And I am just mostly glad that we're kind of out of that phase. Right. Family. I mean, obviously, I miss when they were little, sometimes,