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
Showing posts with label recycling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recycling. Show all posts
Monday, March 1, 2010
Friday, August 7, 2009
Too Many Toothbrushes
My kids come from a long line of hoarders. It’s sad, but true.
While my Beloved and I are both prone to hanging onto stuff that “might be useful someday”, the kids just can’t let go of toothbrushes, among other things.
Given the recommended natural attrition rate of one every 3 to 6 months, we’re talking a whole lotta bristles!
At last count they were up to about 12 apiece.
Thanks to clever marketing by manufacturers, cartoon characters feature heavily (oh yeah, ‘pester power’ is alive and well in the toothbrush aisle). There is Eve and Wall-E, Shrek, pretty much all the Disney Princesses, Mater and Lightning McQueen, Buzz and Woody, Winnie the Pooh and crew, and my son’s latest addition is Bart Simpson. There are also toothbrushes shaped like koalas and other animals (don’t ask me why), as well as the ‘boring’ plain plastic variety in almost every hue.
There are toothbrushes from almost before they had teeth still lurking around- would you believe- toothbrushes that have been chewed more times than any stick of gum, there’re even toothbrushes that I actually don’t recall as belonging to my children at any given time. This is one serious addiction.
But any effort we make to take them away to toss is a dead loss as far as these children are concerned.
The other thing our clutter-loving kids like to hang onto long past their use-by date, is the cardboard roll that once was home to the toilet paper. I cannot even calculate by regular means how many of those have done their thing at the commode yet are still floating about our abode!
I blame myself for that one, as I’m a bit of a crafty greenie, you could say. My kids have learnt that it’s not good to simply throw things away, it’s better to find other ways to reuse or recycle. And so we have no less than 6 of the aforementioned crap-wrap inserts (you can thank my Beloved for that description) currently decorating our dinner table, in the guise of cardboard caricatures of our family (even the dog got a look-in)!
So intent on adding to the roll roundup, my kids have become experts in using up the stuff almost as quick as I can replace it and without word of a lie, you can hear the RINNN-nin-nin-NIN-nin of the toilet paper being spun right off the roll at each visit. If you have kids, I know you know that sound. (One of my girlfriends knows it even better than I do- and she feeds the addiction by buying loo rolls in bulk!)
And it’s a sad state of affairs that we can’t even donate the offending offcuts to the school anymore, as OH&S regulations forbid sending anything in that may have come into contact with contamination. (Whoever wrote that rule has obviously used the bathroom after my son!)
We have tried many ways to wean them off their toothbrush and toilet roll fixation, but learnt a long time ago that if you wanna throw one out, you simply cannot use any garbage can at their eye level or it comes right back out again (talk about your OH&S issues right there!). The only way to do it is under cover of darkness, right before the weekly wheelie-bin collection. That, or let them see me using one of the well-worn brushes to scrub the shower (the “Ewww” factor can work in our favour sometimes).
And so despite our best efforts, our house is home to enough toothbrushes to keep Dr Teeth in business, with enough empty toilet rolls to create a full size reconstruction of the Parthenon!
We can only reassure ourselves with the fact that at least our kids are well-practised in personal hygiene, and when they leave home someday you can be sure that any remaining collections will be personally packed by their parents to make the move along with them.
There’s only, ooh, 15 more years ‘til then, which means roughly 60 toothbrushes and 1500 toilet rolls, if you go by the average family usage.
Hmmm…maybe it’d be easier for us parents to move out instead.
Jx
©2009
While my Beloved and I are both prone to hanging onto stuff that “might be useful someday”, the kids just can’t let go of toothbrushes, among other things.
Given the recommended natural attrition rate of one every 3 to 6 months, we’re talking a whole lotta bristles!
At last count they were up to about 12 apiece.
Thanks to clever marketing by manufacturers, cartoon characters feature heavily (oh yeah, ‘pester power’ is alive and well in the toothbrush aisle). There is Eve and Wall-E, Shrek, pretty much all the Disney Princesses, Mater and Lightning McQueen, Buzz and Woody, Winnie the Pooh and crew, and my son’s latest addition is Bart Simpson. There are also toothbrushes shaped like koalas and other animals (don’t ask me why), as well as the ‘boring’ plain plastic variety in almost every hue.
There are toothbrushes from almost before they had teeth still lurking around- would you believe- toothbrushes that have been chewed more times than any stick of gum, there’re even toothbrushes that I actually don’t recall as belonging to my children at any given time. This is one serious addiction.
But any effort we make to take them away to toss is a dead loss as far as these children are concerned.
The other thing our clutter-loving kids like to hang onto long past their use-by date, is the cardboard roll that once was home to the toilet paper. I cannot even calculate by regular means how many of those have done their thing at the commode yet are still floating about our abode!
I blame myself for that one, as I’m a bit of a crafty greenie, you could say. My kids have learnt that it’s not good to simply throw things away, it’s better to find other ways to reuse or recycle. And so we have no less than 6 of the aforementioned crap-wrap inserts (you can thank my Beloved for that description) currently decorating our dinner table, in the guise of cardboard caricatures of our family (even the dog got a look-in)!
So intent on adding to the roll roundup, my kids have become experts in using up the stuff almost as quick as I can replace it and without word of a lie, you can hear the RINNN-nin-nin-NIN-nin of the toilet paper being spun right off the roll at each visit. If you have kids, I know you know that sound. (One of my girlfriends knows it even better than I do- and she feeds the addiction by buying loo rolls in bulk!)
And it’s a sad state of affairs that we can’t even donate the offending offcuts to the school anymore, as OH&S regulations forbid sending anything in that may have come into contact with contamination. (Whoever wrote that rule has obviously used the bathroom after my son!)
We have tried many ways to wean them off their toothbrush and toilet roll fixation, but learnt a long time ago that if you wanna throw one out, you simply cannot use any garbage can at their eye level or it comes right back out again (talk about your OH&S issues right there!). The only way to do it is under cover of darkness, right before the weekly wheelie-bin collection. That, or let them see me using one of the well-worn brushes to scrub the shower (the “Ewww” factor can work in our favour sometimes).
And so despite our best efforts, our house is home to enough toothbrushes to keep Dr Teeth in business, with enough empty toilet rolls to create a full size reconstruction of the Parthenon!
We can only reassure ourselves with the fact that at least our kids are well-practised in personal hygiene, and when they leave home someday you can be sure that any remaining collections will be personally packed by their parents to make the move along with them.
There’s only, ooh, 15 more years ‘til then, which means roughly 60 toothbrushes and 1500 toilet rolls, if you go by the average family usage.
Hmmm…maybe it’d be easier for us parents to move out instead.
Jx
©2009
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