We Don’t Throw Away Trophies

I’m sure that we save those. Plastic and so cheap you can imagine the $2.99 price tag that once hung from them, but we will keep these forever. Or until the kids come home from college to claim what’s theirs. And then they will shake their heads that their ridiculous mother saved these silly trophies from gymnastics when they were two.

What they won’t know about? The 3,412 art projects from this school year alone. The ones that didn’t make the cut. Right now said art projects are stacked in our spare bedroom waiting their fate. And, I’m afraid, the fate for most of those is the trash can.
The problem is, how do you decide what to keep and what to throw? I’m not exaggerating that Catie came home from Kindergarten with at least 12 projects a day. Okay, maybe some exaggerating there, but not much. And, if I thought about it long enough, I could justify keeping each piece of “art.”
“Look! It’s the first time she wrote her whole name, without misspelling it!” and “Oh! The anatomy of a plant. What if she finally forfeits the plan to be a gymnast, becomes a botanist, and I carelessly threw away her first grasp of plant life?”
I know. Ridiculous. But, really. What mother wants to be the one who threw away all her kids’ memories but kept the crappy plastic trophies?
Even trickier is how to complete the act of throwing away any of our kids’ projects. It happens every time…the second I dump a whole stack of popsicle-stick log cabins and construction paper Texas flags into the trash? That very afternoon will be the one Catie digs in that trash for her lost Polly Pockets shoe and finds all her artwork. Or she’ll find the stuff of Sam and Ellie’s I threw away. She once had a meltdown over a half-colored picture of Jesus that she found in the trash. And she couldn’t even remember where she had colored it. Or if it was even her who had done the coloring.
A friend (and director of our kids’ pre-school with 25 years of experience) advised me to save one project from the fall semester and one from the spring. Only one. Wow. That totally gives me the green light to perform a little end of the year bonfire.
This advice is in direct contrast to another mom who told me how she stamps the date on each of her kids’ projects and archives them all. Really? With four kids and twenty-something years of school each? How would we find the room?
My only hope is that schools really do go paperless one day. Then I can just save something like a flash drive and it will hold all of my kids’ art work. That I can find room for.
Oh. And those crappy plastic trophies.
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2 Responses
  1. I’m telling you – Catie and Sara are kindred spirits. She always find the work I throw away. Let me know when you figure out a system – we can tell them both the rules and act like it’s direction from “the people in charge of saving artwork” and that we have no choice.

  2. I love this. I need to keep up with this blog. It’s so nice to hear your voice through your written words. I miss and love you guys so much and I really need to figure out a time to come out and see you.
    Love love love.

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