The Great Apartment Complex Toy Purge

The lawns that surround our apartment complex are littered with barbecue grills, bikes, and outdoor toys. I mean "littered" in the sense that these items are strewn about in a not entirely orderly fashion, not that the things themselves are trash.

Except actually, some of the things ARE trash. But nobody ever throws anything away on the off chance that it still belongs to someone. I don't want my neighbor getting mad at me for throwing out his rusted-through barbecue even though it's been there for so long it's half sunk into the grass (see above).

That's why I was so excited to receive a notice from the property managers that next week, they will be doing a purge of the apartment lawns. Any item that does not have a tag (which you can obtain in advance from the office) will be thrown away. HALLELUJAH. Now it's like a super suspenseful waiting game to see what will get tagged and what will not. I'm rooting for some of the toys to stay, even though they're not mine, because they are awesome and my kids play with them all the time. Others, if they do get tagged, I might just have to sneak out in the night and remove the tag so they are thrown away ONCE AND FOR ALL.


Let's take a look. First of all, the way you know this purge needs to happen is when you see one of the bike racks and it looks like this:

Yeah.

And I don't mind granting amnesty to toys like this one:

or this one:

But this one - decrepit no-seat trike with pole sticking out of it -

and this one - rusted metal pogo stick -

can just die already.

Then there's this purple trike, which I think every kid in the neighborhood has fallen off of, given the fact that it is somehow fundamentally unbalanced (how fitting that when I found it it was tipped over):

I think we'll all be saying farewell soon to this forlorn, abandoned Sponge Bob ball:

I know the tagging system applies to bikes:

but there's no word yet on whether it will extend to cars. I wish it could. This van has never moved from this spot since we've lived here:

How do I know this? Because by the end of winter it had approximately 15 feet of snow on top of it. Busted. (Another clue is that in the pictures of this complex on the property manager's website, taken who knows how long ago, The Van is in that same spot.)

This car has seen better days and I wish it would just leave:

All of us moms hate this outdoor kitchen:

I think we all realize that sooner or later, one of our kids will contract hantavirus from playing in the stagnant, reeking water that collects in it.

Magdalena will be sad to see this "stroller" go:

I use quotation marks because this thing is a stroller in name only. It's really just a heap of rotting fabric and skewed, rusty metal bars on wheels at this point.

I'll be sure to update you on what stayed and what got purged when the time comes! Maybe I should take guesses on whether or not this Virgin Mary statue will remain.

My bet is that it stays. No one's THAT heartless.