box it came in

[naomikritzer]

I spent several hours today excavating the girls' room. They are not terrible at picking up their toys and putting them away, but Kiera is a packrat. When she wants to save something I think is trash, she squirrels it away in her room and over time winds up with random heaps of crap, mostly paper with little doodles on it, all over their room.

It's not that Molly doesn't save inappropriate stuff, but seriously, when I go to clean out their room, 90% of the crap I have to throw away was saved by Kiera. I filled three trash bags today: crap included things like the little green j-shaped sticks left after you eat one of those carrot-shaped chocolate goodies you can buy at Easter, broken jewelry, Silly Putty wrapped in a tissue because she'd lost or broken the egg, broken toothpicks, a plastic spoon...

I also removed a chair from their room (it was being used as a table for a humidifier, which I moved to a shelf) and I started to remove two oversized boxes that they'd requested ages ago, played with for a day, wanted to keep, and had ignored ever since. I used one to pack away a bunch of pretty dresses that had been hanging up in the closet but were much too small for Kiera anymore. The other got moved to the hallway....where it got rescued by the girls, moved back into their bedroom, labeled "duplicator / unduplicator / time machine / transmogrifier" and outfitted with a large black button to duplicate, unduplicate, travel through time, or transmogrify. And they played with it until dinnertime.

See? Calvin and Hobbes are a good influence!

Anyway, the box is back in their room but there's space for it now, so it's all good.

Comments

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

your post made me smile.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Love it :D

My kiddo is a packrat, too (she gets it from her dad). We haven't excavated her room for a while, but we really should -- the ratio of identifiable things to random heaps of crap (at our house we call them "festering heaps") is tilting ever farther to the right :P

[riverrocks.livejournal.com]

After a couple of stupendous meltdowns followed by grand moping when things I was "saving" disappeared during/after a clean out and/or move, my mother presented me with a shoe box that she had covered with decorative paper. This was my box of utmost importance and I could keep anything that I wanted in that box (as long as it wasn't food or alive) and she promised it would not get thrown away. If it wasn't in the box, it was fair game. If the box was full, I needed to sort through and cull to make room. My great aunt took this one step further and taught me how to make little sculptures out of the things I'd culled and set them free (but then I leaned toward collecting things like acorns, twisted sticks, and flat round rocks so that was not littering). My mom says she just wanted a way to keep from finding little hoards of rocks, sticks and string under my mattress but I have found the combined lessons of permission to love things I find but a need for limits and control very useful as an adult.