Ten Green Bottles

My children have enough drink bottles to slake the thirst of a thousand camels. If camels were to actually require water bottles, that is.

But just as I have lamented before, my kids have a real problem letting go of stuff.

Consequently, we have quite a collection of drink bottles in various shape, size, and shade. Not all of them seem to have a matching lid anymore, which renders the things close to useless in my opinion. Sadly, my opinion differs vastly from theirs.

So do you think they will let me ‘do the right thing’ and pop the bottles in the recycling bin?

I’d have more chance of passing a camel through the eye of a needle, if you’ll forgive the sad plagiarism of a biblical tale in my efforts to extend a metaphor.

See, the medication my son has to take for his juvenile arthritis means he gets mighty thirsty. Being mighty thirsty naturally requires a lot of water (his beverage of choice, God bless him) which requires a lot of containers on call for consumption.

Anyone who has kids knows that no matter how often you remind them, they don’t always remember to grab a drink before you leave the house (ditto using the toilet, but that’s another blog). Likewise, anyone who has kids, and particularly has those close in age, knows that if you then buy one something, the other sorta, kinda, HASTA have a similar sort of something. So the bottle collection grows.

My kids can’t even bear to part with those generic water bottles one can buy everywhere these days- heaven forbid it’s something schmicko with a cartoon character on it- so at least we’re doing our thing for the planet by not chucking too many plastics away. Instead our kitchen cupboards have got this whole landfill-in-a-box thing going on.

And if you’ve ever experience the dreaded Tupperware crash, you’ll know exactly how much I am risking life and limb any time I need to pry open the pantry door. Despite being diagnosed as having very poor hand-eye coordination, I can tell you that I can open/find/remove/shut the cupboard with the best of them (talk about sleight of hand- David Copperfield’s got nothing on me, at this at any rate).

But during one particularly bad day, with the dropsies in full flight, I decided it was time to do the great drink bottle cull of 2010. Having learnt from my mistakes, I decided to do it while the kids were at school.

You can imagine my delight when I managed to dispose of at least a dozen containers that presented without the correct accompanying cap, despite my best efforts at search and retrieval.

You can imagine my despair when I found about half a dozen lids the very next time I opened the cupboard in question….after the weekly recycling collection.

And I am sure you can imagine my children’s faces when they asked me could I “please get out the drink bottle that goes with this cap?”

*sighs*

Oh well, look at it this way. If ever the kids decide to pass the time by singing that old ditty ‘Ten Green Bottles’, we’ll have the right number of props to enact it as we go. And then some.

Jx
©2010