Don't All Boys Love Boxes?

When I saw some giant boxes in an alley today, I had to have them.  Yes, I had my hands full already with my two younger boys, the stroller, my purse, and my own box I had already picked up from the Post Office, but I couldn't pass these babies up!  So I piled them on top of my boys' heads in the stroller and struggled home with all my stuff.  It was worth it.  Endless fun, these boxes are.  

I thought all boys love boxes - all kids, for that matter!  I mean, I'm not a boy or a kid, but I love them!  I love them so much I steal them out of garbage cans and lug them home!  I love to build forts with them (especially if they are big enough for me to fit in too!) and see all the creative ways my boys use them also.  So it's settled: we all love a good, big box, right?  Apparently not.  

I watched my friend's two boys today for her.  They are the same age as my boys and great friends, so it was no trouble at all to have them here - makes my life easier, in fact!  We had already dumpster dived for these boxes before the boys showed up and I was happy that we were going to be able to share this adventure with more boys.  My assumptions were proven incorrect when not only did these boys not want to build a fort with these wonderful boxes, they didn't even seem to notice them!  When I finally pointed them out to them, they asked me why I had boxes in my house and where the stuff that goes in them was!  After a brief conversation about the proper use for a box, we had to agree to disagree that a box is a good toy.  

Oh well.  We had fun anyways.  Our boys always have a great time together, even if it isn't in a box.

I do have to say though, that when Ben got home, he ran upstairs before I did, and when he saw those boxes in his room, he went wild!  "What?!  Mitchell, where did these come from?!  These are huge!  We can do all sorts of stuff with these!"  

Boxes...how can you go wrong?

Dumpster Diving

I come by dumpster diving honestly: my grandpa did it, my dad did it (I specifically remember him finding a sandwich in the garbage at the lake one time and, after not being able to convince anyone else to eat it, ate it himself!  To his credit though, that is the only instance of dumpster diving I remember him doing, albeit pretty gross.)

I have taken dumpster diving to a whole new level though.  Not only did I find quite the treasure, but I made my oldest son do it for me!  After all, the "treasure" was for him and his suboordinate (Mitchell) so why not make him do the actual gathering of the item?

Let me back up a bit to give a little perspective on why a mother would possibly make her 5-year-old son get somthing out of the garbage.  One of our neighboring houses is being demolished.  It is being completely leveled to the ground, and it is an awesome thing to watch, even for me!  In order to get the best seats to watch this fantastic show, we parked our butts down in the ally, not 10 feet away from the tractor performing the amazing feat of knocking down walls and tearing down chimneys and causing total and utter destruction.  It was awesome.  Try to ignore the fact that we were actually sitting on the ground in a dirty ally, leaning our backs against someone else's garage door, hoping it didn't open on us and send us falling backwards into someone's garage.  It is at these times, when we are having so much fun doing something or watching something we don't normally get to do or see, that I wonder if providing a new and exciting experience for my boys is worth the fact that it is filthy and we are actually sitting on the ground getting covered by the dust of a newly demolished building.  Obviously, I chose fun over cleanliness this time.

So there we were, sitting on the ground, watching one man working a tractor, one man spraying the mess with a fire hose, and one man just sitting on the fence watching ("supervising" I presume.  Wish I had his job), when something caught my eye on top of the garbage bins next to us.  Now this was actually on top of the garbage bins, not actually in the bins, so it's OK, right?  It looked to me like a child's workbench, taken apart and placed on top of the bins.  The bins were squished in between the work site and the next building, so I couldn't actually reach the workbench to check it out, so I lifted Ben up and onto the bins, and he crawled across them to give me a report on what he found there.  His glowing report was that it was, indeed, a fully intact and clean workbench that had been taken apart a bit in order to fit in the small space, but otherwise in great shape!  He dragged it back to me, and we quickly carried it a block back to our house (quickly in case someone somehow knew that I had just taken a toy out of the garbage and scolded/criticized me for my disgusting act.) 

       We cleaned the thing up, brought it upstairs, put all our tools in/on it, and it is our new favorite toy!  The funny thing is, we almost bought this very same toy for Mitchell at Christmas last year, but it was more money than we wanted to spend on just one toy, so we passed.  Should I be finding and bringing home someone else's garbage (or, more correctly, encouraging my child to do so?)  My final thought on the matter is that when the "treasure" is good enough, the answer is a big "yes!"