Childhood Revisited

Like a lot of mothers, over the course of our children's growing-up, I saved a lot of the pictures, stories, school projects, etc. that they did. What didn't get posted on the refrigerator door got put in boxes or file folders in a file cabinet.

The file cabinet then got "buried." There was so much furniture in my tiny office that you could only get to the top two drawers. It wasn't until we did a gigantic reorganization of the office that I was able to free up the bottom 3 drawers and have a chance to go through them.

I found stuff I hadn't seen in 20 years, stuff I'd always meant to give back to the kids when they grew up. So a couple of Christmases ago, I made up a big box for each of them, since I didn't want to just throw all of these "valuable" things away, but I also was trying to declutter, somewhat, and didn't want to keep them.

With a heavy heart, I did toss Paul's and David's, but for the other three, I made a box to give them each at Christmas. Tom and Laurel weren't going to be making it to Christmas with us that year, so I gave Tom his box at Thanksgiving. It was fun watching him go through it and Laurel seeing it all for the first time.

The book Laurel reads is really kind of funny. Tom has the soul of a Virgo and was always trying to keep things neat in this always-messy house, so this story is particularly appropriate!

What's funny is that Tom found a math paper which had a bad grade on it and his uncle Norm starts giving him a hard time about it. Tom was so indignant about it that he did some further investigation and proved that it wasn't HIS paper, but Paul's.