Toy Story
A couple of daddy blogs wrote this week about the accumulation of toys and more toys, so I thought I'd add my two cents to the discussion.
I'm a recovering pack rat, and it looks as though my kids have inherited that particular gene from me. My son saves every rock he picks up from our travels. Each stone and pebble represents a happy memory of a day at the lake or a trek up a mountain trail. Trouble is, he has no idea which rock is which, so they're all just one big jumble of quartz and granite all over his room. Many years ago, when I was a student at the University of Idaho, there was a story about the discovery that a building on campus was in danger of collapse from the sheer weight of the geology department's rock collection. I'm afraid my son is on his way to that.
My daughter doesn't actively collect anything yet, although she does love her Princess gear. The biggest box of toys in her room contains kitchen play items. She has more pots, pans, utensils and dishes than we have in our real kitchen. And her stuff is nicer too!
I've asked both kids if they want to weed through their toys and give away the ones they don't play with anymore. That didn't go well. So we wait until they're asleep to sneak the old baby toys into a box bound for Goodwill. But I have a hard time parting with some of their things, especially those items that the kids played with a lot - like the little wooden Thomas Train engines and tracks. Those toys hold special memories for me, as I spent many hours helping my son build train tracks all over the living room floor and into the kitchen and down the hall.
Beyond the toys, I've begun to notice another growing problem. During my son's kindergarten year, we saved just about every piece of paper he brought home... The first squiggily attempts at writing and math, the art projects dripping with too much glue, even the handouts and calendars the teacher would send home. Now, in first grade, the amount of paper that he brings into the house is starting to overwhelm us. I have to be much more selective in what we save and what we toss.
While we're worrying about stepping on toys, we might just find ourselves drowning in paper!
I'm a recovering pack rat, and it looks as though my kids have inherited that particular gene from me. My son saves every rock he picks up from our travels. Each stone and pebble represents a happy memory of a day at the lake or a trek up a mountain trail. Trouble is, he has no idea which rock is which, so they're all just one big jumble of quartz and granite all over his room. Many years ago, when I was a student at the University of Idaho, there was a story about the discovery that a building on campus was in danger of collapse from the sheer weight of the geology department's rock collection. I'm afraid my son is on his way to that.
My daughter doesn't actively collect anything yet, although she does love her Princess gear. The biggest box of toys in her room contains kitchen play items. She has more pots, pans, utensils and dishes than we have in our real kitchen. And her stuff is nicer too!
I've asked both kids if they want to weed through their toys and give away the ones they don't play with anymore. That didn't go well. So we wait until they're asleep to sneak the old baby toys into a box bound for Goodwill. But I have a hard time parting with some of their things, especially those items that the kids played with a lot - like the little wooden Thomas Train engines and tracks. Those toys hold special memories for me, as I spent many hours helping my son build train tracks all over the living room floor and into the kitchen and down the hall.
Beyond the toys, I've begun to notice another growing problem. During my son's kindergarten year, we saved just about every piece of paper he brought home... The first squiggily attempts at writing and math, the art projects dripping with too much glue, even the handouts and calendars the teacher would send home. Now, in first grade, the amount of paper that he brings into the house is starting to overwhelm us. I have to be much more selective in what we save and what we toss.
While we're worrying about stepping on toys, we might just find ourselves drowning in paper!
Permalink posted by Phil at 12:21 AM
3 Comments:
Don't get rid of the wooden tracks, they are irreplaceable!! At least that's what I tell my wife when we start to go through stuff.
My son also has an enormous collection of sticks. Sticks of every imaginable size and shape, each and every one of them very precious to him. And he's 11. He's been collecting the sticks since he could walk. Needless to say we've managed to "lose" some of them, but he still has a lot. Fortunately we've convinced him that sticks stay outside, but the downside is that our front porch has a huge stack of his sticks.
It's funny how we can become attached to these little things, that they take on such emotional meaning. I think with kids especially that's true, because, as with photos, they contain within them those parts of our kids that no longer exist, them when they were littler than they are now.
oh yeah, I forgot... on the paper, we are drowning in it. I think we've kept everything from both kids every grade (my wife is the culprit here...) And they're in 8th and 5th this year. It's a lot of paper, cumulatively 15 years worth of paper...
I'm having the same problem. With one in kindergarten and one in pre-k the art masterpieces already are requiring either a new addition to our home or some other creative solution. I have begun to take a digital picture of just about everything so in case some of it becomes lost there will always be a record. I got this idea from AKMA at http://akma.disseminary.org/. He is religious about this it seems and even posts the art on Flickr for the world to see at http://www.flickr.com/photos/akma/sets/19966/. Making this effort and involving my boys in the picture-taking,editing, etc. has been very rewarding. It will, however, not result in few works of art, I assure you. Quite to the contrary actually.
So when this gets a bit tedious I just remind myself that these are "the good old days". And it gets better after that
Post a Comment
<< Home