That Day Has Come

I threw out my cardboard stash yesterday.

What manner of madness motivated such an atrocity? Ah, as is often the case, we needed the storage space for Other Things. 

I considered titling this post A Bleak Season or She Would Never Get Out Of Bed Again but you know what? I wasn't as depressed as I thought it'd be. Not even upset, actually.

Two reasons: one, the kids have grown up. They are not so old that they're leaving the house to get engineering or culinary degrees, but no longer so young that cardboard toys cause within them rabid levels of excitement. Again, not as disheartening as I'd imagined. Now, this in no way suggests that cardboard has lost any of its amazingness - no, cardboard will forever be supreme (and no one will convince me otherwise). However, I think I'm ready to accept that building cardboard playthings had its moments - of which our family has had arguably more than its fair share - and those moments have somehow passed, and passed with their dignity intact.

And two, I am comforted by the knowledge that IKEA remains a veritable trove of Good Cardboard - free, large, clean and in an astounding variety of thicknesses, strengths and textures. Should I in the near future require new building material, I can drive there in minutes, find what I need and save the environment, all without sacrificing precious storage space in our house.

It was fun to reminisce, though, as Emily and I pulled out piece after piece from under the bed in the guest bedroom, where I had amassed and curated my collection over the years since we've owned this house. 

"Oh, this was the box from the cardboard nightstand!" "We made the Barbie House from this piece!" "Remember this?" "Remember that?"

That's what creating with children is about, after all, isn't it? Not only passing on skills and producing workable designs but also simply being. Sitting and gluing. Slicing and drawing. Decorating and embellishing. All the while making up crazy stories about baby bunnies in hutches, paper fish in aquariums, parrots in pirate ships, castles and maidens and automobiles and telephones and pizza parlors and little peg children journeying to fantastical lands at the tops of impossible trees.

Yes, good memories. 

But because it's irresponsible (not to mention ridiculous) that a house be completely devoid of cardboard, I let myself keep a few of the more interesting pieces. Do you see that crazy piece in the photo? How many flute layers are there in that piece in the photo? I lost count after ten. 

They'll live in a very small box in the garage.  For emergencies, you know.

Well. I just looked at my sidebar and realized that my last post was almost two months ago. I missed you guys! I hope everyone had a lovely summer. Ours was good, but too short. It felt like I blinked and it was the first day of school and I hadn't done nearly enough summering as I'd have liked. The kids spent a lot of time in the water. One of them took a self-taught algebra course that enabled her to skip a Math grade in the fall. Another dabbled very successfully with yeast baking. Two learned to dive off a springboard. At least one of them sewed more than I did, and invited at least one friend over for sewalongs (we made pencil cases like these). I finished a commissioned project for a magazine that took up a fair bit of my summer but which was very rewarding. Everyone hung out with neighbors and friends and got to know each other better over games and food and exercise, before the Big Freeze sends us all back into our caves.

Making-wise, I always feel that I accomplished pretty close to zilch with my own projects. Summer is such a non-ideal time for pleasure-sewing; everything else seems to be more urgent, and rightly so: being outdoors, doing things with the kids, tutoring Math, helping dough to rise, riding bikes and swimming under a sunny sky that for just three months in the year, actually feels as warm as it looks. 

But now fall is upon us. It's nice to have a routine again, and the house to myself now that the kids are back at school. There are upcoming birthdays that require gifts, Halloween activities that require costumes, and ikatbag patterns that require prototypes. Lots of sewing in my future, it looks like. 

It'll be a good distraction from the cardboard I no longer have. Or, to put it another way: it's a good thing I no longer have cardboard with which to procrastinate on the sewing (sniff).