Sara: Mommy, Mommy!  The teachers are letting us KEEP our Work Boxes from our desks!  We get to bring them home!

Mommy: You mean that plastic box in your desk where you keep pencils?

Sara: Yes!  I can’t wait to add it to my stationery supplies.

As I unpacked Sara’s many, many, many….many loads of “stuff” that came home from school this week (is it just me, or did your child’s school puke up all over your kitchen too?), I found the “treasured work box“.  Let’s take an inventory, shall we?  Scissors (check, good), 2nd pair of scissors (with a 6 year old, this borders on dangerous…as in, knowing Sara, she used one for paper, and the other for hair), glue (check, also appropriate), 2 dominoes (why not?), a ROCK (what can I say, she’s a naturalist…and it beats the pounds of dead leaves I cleaned out of her locker), a pencil sharpener (never used…everyone knows a true ADHD kid sharpens their pencil ACROSS the room), a ping pong ball (um…no clue whatsoever), a pack of gum, a random piece of a gear (she got an A+ on her Simple Machines Project; that’s my girl!), one purple crayon, one black crayola pencil, a pencil grip NOT attached to a pencil, some paper scraps covered with tiny pinholes, and well, and this goes almost without saying, the most UTILITARIAN supply needed by any 1st grader, a tiny purple Eiffel Tower.

Wait.  Missed a critical item: one pencil wrapped in Kleenex which is fastened by tape, and decorated with pink and purple marker.  You never know when you might need to both write and blow you nose with the same instrument, and it’s far better to manage this task if the Kleenex is decorated. Of course, the Kleenex made it impossible to attach the very important pencil grip, which was personally selected and fit for Sara by a highly trained Occupational Therapist.  So it sits, completely unused, probably not far from her GLASSES.  Also lost in her desk for the last 2 weeks of school.

So does this work box explain a lot of things, or do those “things” explain this work box?  It’s really just a pointless argument of semantics, because I think we all know this is not so much of a work box as it is a box of random junk collected by the world’s most endearing kid.  Peaking into her mind takes guts and patience, but in the rare instance when I find both, I am usually rewarded with a good laugh.  The Bloggess has a great post this week on not just laughing in spite of it, but laughing BECAUSE of it (whatever your “it” might be).  And to the Moms who got tagged “It” in the big game of ADHD Parenting, I wish you luck on unpacking those backpacks this week.  What our kids lack in organization they more than make up for with entertaining variety.  Can’t you just hear Sara at lunch? “I SEE your ping pong ball, and I RAISE you one Eiffel Tower…”