Have you ever seen the show ‘Hoarders’? You know – the one where people’s homes
are condemned because they’re filled to the brim with junk? Well, that might just be Rya’s ticket
to fame one day. She’s always been
a bit of an odd cookie – and her latest weirdo trait is that she has a habit of
collecting the strangest objects.
It began with small, understandable things – like picking up pebbles
outside and keeping them in her pocket.
Ivan teases her that she’s trying to hang on to memories the way Joe
Pesci’s character did in the movie ‘With Honours’ (for anyone who’s watched it:
‘boy oh boy’). Then she started
getting a bit obsessed with bandaids.
My parents tell me they bought a lot of bandaid boxes to keep me happy
as a child too, so I chalked that one up as normal. But the collections are definitely
evolving to include some very random things, that Rya still seems to find
interest in.
Each night, she insists on bringing at least a handful of
things to bed. Usually it includes
bits and pieces of things she’s been ‘working on’ – so pieces of paper,
crayons, sticky notes, etc. Once
she wanted to bring some snack leftovers and when I warned her that bugs
would come for them, she suggested I put them in a Ziploc bag. I was so impressed by the idea that I had to
oblige – but that has just added to her addiction. Now it’s a regular occurrence for Rya to request a Ziploc
bag to hold as many random objects as she can squeeze inside – pompoms, board
game pieces, dice, coupons, decorative tissue paper, you name it. And if you want to test the theory that
hoarders have an emotional connection with their belongings – I dare you to
hide one of those items in the morning – or better yet – let it fall under the
bed when you’re trying to put her to sleep. She will tell you the exact size, colour, and shape of the missing
object and insist that she gets it back.
In fact, last night Mariah tried to include a finger puppet in her
bedtime stash but then realized it was missing an eye. Sure enough – she convinced her daddy
to get out his hot glue gun and put another googley eye on her puppet before
she went to bed.
Sometimes Mariah’s objects include wardrobe accessories that
she wakes up still wearing in the morning. It doesn’t even surprise us anymore to see Mariah emerge
from her room wearing a combination of Ivan’s tie, my eye covers, and/or a pink
cape. And whereas most kids go to
bed wanting a book to read – Mariah sometimes requests a pen and paper since
she learned to threaten ‘writing a report on you’ from her school. I thought that one was so funny that I
actually loaned her my clipboard, since I can relate to her love for paperwork
: )
And as much as all of Mariah’s little stuff makes me laugh…it
also reminds me about a really nice quote I came across recently:
Listen earnestly to
anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen
eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big
stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.
~Catherine M. Wallace~
