You may not have known it, but this week is National Preservation Week. It’s not a very well known holiday, but parents actually celebrate it all the time.
That’s because kids are great at preservation.
I’m not talking about the kind of preservation that looks like kids picking up litter on the side of the road or pointing out how the landscape changes when trees are razed or urging their parents to turn off the air conditioner in the middle of a Texas June because they just read a book on global warming (this is what happens when you have a 9-year-old conservationist on your hands, at least in my experience). These are all passions to be celebrated.
But what I’m talking about is how good kids are at finding trash and turning it into delightful treasure.
Take, for instance, the boxes we get from Amazon.
We are Amazon Primers. Anything I can do to keep my kids out of a store, I’ll do. If that means having everything I need (with the exception of my groceries, which I suspect might be coming soon) delivered right to my door, I guess I’ll do it. So we subscribe to everything. Toothpaste, soap, toilet paper, coconut oil, stevia, cacao nibs, almond flour, more vitamins than we probably need, skin care lotions, makeup, you name it, we subscribe to it. I would subscribe to subscribing if I could.
Because we order so much from Amazon, and because it’s always delivered straight to our door in bulk, we never have a shortage of boxes for the kids to keep.
Sometimes this is cool, because every now and then I get a wild hair and do a fun art project with the boys, wherein we’ll decorate a box for somewhere around the house and watch it, day by day by day, get destroyed by the errant legs or flailing arms of wrestling boys.
But sometimes, like when we get an enormous box for all the other boxes, because, apparently, this makes it easier to ship, this is not cool at all. Mostly because I’ll be the one to trip over it and bust my face on the side of the couch—which, you would think, is well padded. Well. It isn’t. See if you’re well padded after having five boys flip over you at 6:30 p.m. every evening when they should be doing chores.
My 9-year-old is probably the worst best little environmentalist in the house. He will keep everything. He’s been making a little money working with his daddy on some video client work, because he wants to be a cinematographer and Husband’s trying to introduce him to the world of video recording, and he’s been buying all sorts of Pokemon cards with his hard-earned money—which is mostly paid for arranging lights in the right formation and cropdusting all over the tiny room because he’s nervous.
He likes to keep his Pokemon boxes, because he “might need them someday.” And, besides, they can be reused for a pencil collection site on his bedroom desk.
Hey, as long as it’s not in my bedroom, go for it.
But now the other boys have gotten in on the act. When one of them is on trash duty, they’ll argue about what we throw in the trash, because, of course, it can all be reused for something useful—like a receptacle for lone socks (already have one…or five) or a rubber band holder (I’d really rather not) or a great container for preserving diapers (why would you…?).
They’ve made some tiny trees out of logs,which are really the charred remains from the outdoor fireplace we don’t ever use in Texas because it’s a thousand degrees most of the year, and grass in the backyard, and they want to bring these “treeple” in, because they’ll be ruined outside, and we CERTAINLY can’t throw them away.
The worst preservation my kids do? The papers.
My kids are very artistic kids, in that they will create all hours of the day. If creating were homework, we would not have our every-single-day fights, because they would gladly sit at the table and draw a line on a piece of paper and call it finished (if you’re the 4-year-olds). AND THEY’LL WANT TO KEEP EVERY SINGLE MASTERPIECE.
It doesn’t matter if they’re only 4 and this “fox” doesn’t really look like a fox, and they’ll be better at it in another three years. They want to keep it now, because they’re sure their future self will appreciate it. The 6-year-old doesn’t care that the piece of paper he just dumped from his red school folder was a quiz where he circled the answers, and the only evidence that it’s his is the name printed at the top of it—he’ll want to keep it to remember what his “handwriting was like.” The 9-year-old has a mad scientist’s stash of plans for the house he’ll build someday, and no amount of persuasive arguments will take those papers and crumple them in the trash (he’s a persistent kid, so he knows how to deal with persistent parents).
I’m trying to swim through the papers, but my head keeps going under.
I guess I should be glad I’m living with six preservationists, but it does get annoying every now and then. Except when someone sees that gigantic Amazon box and wonders what it would be like to ride down the stairs—because I actually fit in it, which means, you guessed it, I can ride down the stairs in it, too.
Who knew preservation could be so dangerous fun?
