Collections

Collections of the way life used to be...

One thing about being a grandma is that it involves many things.

Kenz has little groupings of items all over her house and all over my house.

Her latest favorite collection contains those little sponge animals that pop out of a capsule when they are put in hot water. (My mom has a whole zip-loc bag of them, Nana!)

Then there are the Perlers, which are brightening just about every corner of both our houses. Nana, you can use them for coasters, so your furniture doesn't get spots. We are coasting to the max in the colorful plastic discs.

Markers and crayons and pens and pencils... a person can never have enough of these. We have shoeboxes of them. (Daba says he wishes he had just one shoebox full of hundred dollar bills.) Bursting on the scene again, are the Barbie dolls and her friends, lots of Hannahs. They have a motor home and a combination disco/airplane. At Kenz's house, she owns a Barbie townhome, furnished. All of them come with thousands of tiny plastic pieces of food, glasses and travel accessories. Accessories also abound in the wardobe department. In yesterday's episode, Kenz's Fairy collection descended on the Barbie's and taught them how to fly, the ones who were sitting quietly with their hand raised. Speaking of Barbie, this week at Montessori, the spotlight is on the letter B. Kenz was so excited to show me her B collection of words.... bat, bee, bear, basket, bananas, bunny, bug, and balloons, which we are adding to the pile of papers containing A words....Africa, ant, alligator, apple, avocado, airplane, antelope, aardvark and anemone.

Let talk books; you need more of these than crayons. Let's just say we have a wonderful assortment, and we're saving every last one of them for the new baby to enjoy. We also have a stack from our bi-monthly trip to the public library. Once I lost a library book, so I am constantly trying to keep this collection in one spot, for fear of paying the replacement fee.

In the playroom closet I have three large baskets with collections of glue sticks, construction paper, Popsicle sticks, foamies, glitter, paint, play-doh and bubbles. I just checked to see what else is up there, and I found a Zip-loc full of the Polly Pockets with the magnets that were recalled. Oh, the stash of children's videos and DVDs is in the closet, too!

I think it could be said that a child's collections are indeed....... endless....

I remember the days when my son had tons of Legos and my daughter had lots of plastic jewels and stickers. There were seasons of collections, different ones for different ages, but there was always continuous collections of objects for both of them.

As long as they have their spots to BE.... collections are OK wit me!