I’ve been cleaning up my old posts that I imported from LiveJournal — most of them encountered minor formatting errors when they were imported. It’s taking forever. I have four years of past posts to correct so they should all be finished sometime in the year 2010. I hope.
Anyway, I came across this post from back in 2004, made when I was packing for our move before Gal Smiley was born. In it I note that my mother’s mother, my Nana, is a very streamlined woman who never keeps anything. Her need to throw things away led my mother to become a total pack rat, who never gets rid of anything. Her keeping of everything has led her daughters, on the most part, to be thrower-outers.
It’s a chain of tosser-pack rat-tosser. Yet it still amazes me when the Captain, taking his turn in the cycle, wants to keep everything in the world. It’s as if this blog has taught me nothing.
Both Captain Jelly Belly and Gal Smiley are very prolific producers of art. Our art process around here goes like this: completed art goes in a big messy pile in the office; every three months we sort the pile into Captain versus Gal, keep versus recycle/throw away; the keep piles get divided into a pile of three or four things to keep in their permanent collection (in an art box in their room), a pile of things to send to each grandmother, and a pile of things to display in the playroom.
Lately the Captain has tried to circumnavigate the process by declaring that his artworks are “gifts” for me and Sir Monkeypants. He knows that “gift” art does not have to go in the big pile for future sorting; instead he gets to put it on our bedside tables where we can admire it and show how much we love it by gazing at it affectionately every day.
Plus we can’t really throw it away as it would hurt his feelings. Aha!
So now we both have a growing pile of art on our bedside tables, and I can’t find my alarm clock any more or see the massive pile of books I’m supposed to be reading. We can’t go on like this. Eventually we have to get rid of the pile.
So…how long do you think we need to keep various works of art in this scenario? Until he forgets about the ones at the bottom of the pile? Until he’s spending the night at a sleepover at a friend’s house?
Until he goes to university?
Maybe we should just hang it all on the walls and open a gallery. We’ll make a mint!
TurtleHead 
Check out My Kid Could Paint That.
I was totally thinking of that movie when I made the reference to opening an art gallery! I was going to be more explicit but I figured no one would have heard of it.
I haven’t seen the film but I’d love to. I can’t believe that people bought that kid’s artwork. It really says a lot, I think, about the art world today, and how marketing is a big, big part of it. There’s no objectivity in art, I guess.
Anyway, it does give me hope for the art piles around here :).
One of my friends surrounds her child with all of his art from the past month, takes some pictures and then round files stuff. That might work?
I had a serious attack of nostalgia as I made the switch from LJ, including the post where I said that I could never be a pediatrician because I didn’t like to take care of sick kids.
I want to go back to 2004 to that green horn third-year medical student and say, “Nanny-nanny-boo-boo.”
🙂
Beck — good idea. This has worked for us in the past with PlayDoh projects — preserve on film, then squish. I’ll try it!
Beth — I can’t believe you ever thought that you wouldn’t want to work with kids! You’re so fantastically caring in your posts, and clearly good at your job. If you lived in town I’d want you to care for my own little ones!