Little by little, my parents are divesting their house of my junk. Each time they come to visit, they bring a box (or several) of my Hess trucks, baseball cards, books, Matchbox cars, or old school papers. The last time they were here, they brought an overstuffed folder of my schoolwork from kindergarten. I couldn't believe it. These papers were 32 years old! Why hadn't they thrown them away long ago?
Here's how it works, from the parental point-of-view. Your precious little snowflake brings home a piece of paper with something that resembles a colorized Rorschach test.
You: "Oh, that's a beautiful, um, dinosaur? Playground? Baseball player?"
Snowflake: "Daddy, that's our family. This is me, that's you, and there's mommy."
You (who didn't know until just now that you had self-tanning-spray-gone-awry-orange skin, lime green eyes, and jet black hair that sticks straight up): "Well, we will certainly keep this."
And you do keep it. But then, maybe the next day, maybe a few days later, a new picture comes home. Well, because this one's even nicer than that old one, you have to keep the new picture, too. That's the logic that gets us into these messes. Eventually, though, it doesn't matter if any progress is displayed. All the papers go into the Kindergarten File. It has to be that way. The kids work on their projects and present them to you as if they were handing over Lord Stanley's Cup, and what sort of glacial parent could toss them into the recycle bin? That Kindergarten File, though, eventually finds its way to the basement and is forgotten for twenty or thirty years, until you have the opportunity to return it to your now-grown up, but still precious, snowflake with a mortgage and his own basement to store all this crap.
I have some prolific little artists, so we have started our own Kindergarten Files. We also have Pre-school Files, Random Things They Made At Home Files, and Stuff Aaron Made At Our Neighbor's House Files. But this problem of long-term storage is, I am happy to say, a thing of the past. It's a 20th century problem, and we are parents of 21st century children. It's time to become friends with digital storage. I scan the kids' artwork to the computer (mom, that's the link you want to click on) so that if the originals somehow wind up in the Residential Mixed Paper bin, we still have records of their glorious achievements. That picture at the top of this post is one of Aaron's fingerpaint creations. I used it as my computer desktop background image for a long time.
Someday I will hand over CDs or thumbdrives containing all this stuff to my kids and make them deal with it. By then, I imagine the preferred format for data storage might be a three-dimensional holographic data cube, but I'll give them antiquated formats just to be a curmudgeonly old man.
Are you wondering about my own 32 year old Kindergarten File? I haven't thrown it out yet, but that is simply due to laziness. I'll take a look through it, and if the colors have faded from the pictures I drew, then the kids can re-color them. We'll call it a Ted Turner party. After that, everything gets recycled.
Here's how it works, from the parental point-of-view. Your precious little snowflake brings home a piece of paper with something that resembles a colorized Rorschach test.
You: "Oh, that's a beautiful, um, dinosaur? Playground? Baseball player?"
Snowflake: "Daddy, that's our family. This is me, that's you, and there's mommy."
You (who didn't know until just now that you had self-tanning-spray-gone-awry-orange skin, lime green eyes, and jet black hair that sticks straight up): "Well, we will certainly keep this."
And you do keep it. But then, maybe the next day, maybe a few days later, a new picture comes home. Well, because this one's even nicer than that old one, you have to keep the new picture, too. That's the logic that gets us into these messes. Eventually, though, it doesn't matter if any progress is displayed. All the papers go into the Kindergarten File. It has to be that way. The kids work on their projects and present them to you as if they were handing over Lord Stanley's Cup, and what sort of glacial parent could toss them into the recycle bin? That Kindergarten File, though, eventually finds its way to the basement and is forgotten for twenty or thirty years, until you have the opportunity to return it to your now-grown up, but still precious, snowflake with a mortgage and his own basement to store all this crap.
I have some prolific little artists, so we have started our own Kindergarten Files. We also have Pre-school Files, Random Things They Made At Home Files, and Stuff Aaron Made At Our Neighbor's House Files. But this problem of long-term storage is, I am happy to say, a thing of the past. It's a 20th century problem, and we are parents of 21st century children. It's time to become friends with digital storage. I scan the kids' artwork to the computer (mom, that's the link you want to click on) so that if the originals somehow wind up in the Residential Mixed Paper bin, we still have records of their glorious achievements. That picture at the top of this post is one of Aaron's fingerpaint creations. I used it as my computer desktop background image for a long time.
Someday I will hand over CDs or thumbdrives containing all this stuff to my kids and make them deal with it. By then, I imagine the preferred format for data storage might be a three-dimensional holographic data cube, but I'll give them antiquated formats just to be a curmudgeonly old man.
Are you wondering about my own 32 year old Kindergarten File? I haven't thrown it out yet, but that is simply due to laziness. I'll take a look through it, and if the colors have faded from the pictures I drew, then the kids can re-color them. We'll call it a Ted Turner party. After that, everything gets recycled.
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