A Good Old Fashioned Land Grab

I have vowed to defend our nation, and am proud to my core to do so. However, I have to concede that the USA I have grown to love and serve has done some rather nasty things over the years. Land grabs are one such thing. Some of the land that was occupied by Native Americans was pocketed by the American government and then doled out to the Caucasian settlers on a first come-first serve basis. The displacing of Native Americans was viewed as a good thing at the time, but has come to be reviled as part of our misguided colonial past.

As much as I acknowledge that we, Americans, were wrong in stealing land from the Native American tribes that inhabited it, I can not fight my ancestry. For that reason, as wrong as it may have been, Rachel and I partook in a good old fashioned land grab over the weekend. We began claiming territory around the house that belonged to other inhabitants and made it our own. We are not sorry.

For starters, Rachel cleared the kitchen counter space of most of the bottle making materials. Where once sat a faded, pink maternity ward bucket that served as our bottle deposit throughout the day, there is now just glorious, open space. The counter that was our formula depot, holding powder, scoops, rubber nipples and towels now holds a coffee maker. Our lust for land didn't stop there though. Rachel then cleared out closets, ridding ourselves of the outgrown, unloved clothes of yesteryear.

Even poor, innocent Tyson was not immune from our greedy grasps. Rachel decided to do something that should have been done ages ago: She cleaned out Tyson's overflowing, unsightly toy box. She originally had a huge pile of ripped, stained chew toys that were to be disposed of, but then she couldn't do it. It seems my habit of naming all of Tyson's toys came back to hurt us, as her conscience got the best of her. She simply could not evict Black the Cat, Chicago the Bear, Pizza the Octopus or Loompha the Loofah Dog. However, Spider the Turtle and several other unnamed toys got the boot.

Our territorial takeover was not for naught, though. We did clear out a good amount of space and beautified some others in the goal of making the house more appealing to potential buyers when it goes on the market next month. And, bonus, aside from Spider the Turtle, we didn't even have to usurp anyone's legitimate claim of land in the process. I guess not all land grabs have to be bad after all.