Stickers

When I was mentally composing this post last night in bed, as I sometimes do when I am not going to sleep as I should be, I pieced together a neat little intro that went like this: "For the last year or so, Gabe has been really into stickers."  Stock stuff, obviously. Nothing zazzy, just jump right in with a brief intro to the topic. Then I thought about it a little longer and realized that isn't even remotely the case.

To my way of thinking, pretty much EVERYTHING has been "for the last year or so." That's just the time frame my brain automatically goes to. High school? A year or so ago. Gabe's first birthday? A year or so ago. And so on. I have a poor grasp of time, I'm afraid. But that's beside the point.

As I thought back, I remembered that I had referenced stickers several times in this blog and, specifically, how much Gabe loves them. Most notable was the time he put "polka dots" on the TV. And I don't even know how long ago that was. A year or so, I'd guess.

He likes stickers and he really always has. I fail to see the appeal. Yes, there is a certain satisfying tactile sensation. Picking at a corner, there is always a slight thrill when you actually get it to come up without tearing. Peeling the sticker back and then having endless possibilities with it. Where should it go? Should it be part of a tableau, carefully crafted with other stickers to create a real or imagined scene reenactment--awesome in its pure expression of the perfect potential for the characters (or whatever) involved? Or should it be a piece of an elaborate, baroque, and meaningful decoration, wrapping around a treasured picture or object? So many options! It's like a metaphor for life itself with all of its myriad possibilities stretching out to infinity!

But, meh.

 Last night, Gabe had his first book fair at the school. Obviously not something that we NEED to participate in, what with the whole owning a bookstore thing going on, but we did it anyway because Libby has fond memories of the ones she went to as a child. We didn't have book fairs at our school. It was too small and, really, I was about the only student there when I was going that enjoyed reading. So it would have been a pretty disappointing affair with only me sitting on the floor in the middle of a spray of books. He had a tough time deciding on what he wanted.  Well, he had a tough time deciding on what he wanted that we were willing to buy him.

He WANTED a new Star Wars sticker book. It would be, I think, his fourth or fifth. But the sticker books are kind of expensive and we can order them from the store at our cost, so it didn't make much sense buying one there. He was hugely disappointed and settled on a Lego picture/story book that I'm pretty sure he will never look at more than once.

On the way home, we had a little discussion on the subject of wasting money. We've not been great about this in the past, choosing to buy our kids WAY more than we should be and giving in WAY more than we should do whenever they whine about wanting one thing or another. Partly we want to give them all the things they want (whether that is best for them or not), but partly we just want them to shut the hell up and caving in early means less aggravation in the long run (so, you know, laziness). But we're trying to be more responsible about those things now, and this seemed like a good teaching moment.

"Gabe, you don't NEED another sticker book," I reasoned. "You have a half dozen or so big, thick sticker books. Spiderman, Superman, three Star Wars books, and a generic Lego one, as I recall. You haven't used all of the stickers in ANY of those books yet."

"But there are too many stickers in them!" was his reasoning.

"And so you want MORE stickers when you already have more than you can use?" Bam! Suck on that logic, five year old! My superior adult brain just schooled you!

"Yes," he replied simply. And there goes my logic in the toilet where it usually ends up.

"Well, no. That's not how it works. I tell you what, when you use up all the stickers in your other books, then maybe we can look at ordering you a new one."

He sighed and I thought that was the end of that.

After we put him to bed, things were pretty quiet upstairs for quite awhile. I figured they had both gone to sleep because neither had napped. But, after an hour, Gabe came down holding one of his sticker books up with an excited look in his eyes.

"Look, dad! I used up all the stickers in this one!" And he held up the book for my inspection. He carefully flipped through all the pages to show me how empty they were.

"What did you do with the stickers?" I asked, somewhat nervously. He didn't have any paper up there, just books, furniture, and walls. But he's always been pretty good about not putting his stickers on non-sticker-friendly surfaces. Ever since the polka-dot incident, anyway.

"I put them on the books."

"Which books?" I asked, again, afraid that he had just picked out some of his chapter books and started filling the pages with stickers.

"The sticker books."

"Ah, I said. Good work." And I left it at that.

A little while later, Libby talked with him a bit more about it and Gabe said, as he began to work on the second book in his stack, "This is going to take me all night!"

And it might have. We're talking thousands of stickers here. But, instead, he went into the extra bedroom and fell asleep in that bed because his bed was filled with books. I inspected them and saw what he had done with the stickers.

 

 

 

Figuring out what he did with the stickers wasn't tough to spot. In effect, he had simply pulled each sticker out of the book and randomly applied it to the back of another sticker book. Not exactly what I had in mind when I told him to "use" the stickers. I imagined them having some sort of actual, planned application. Silly me. Also, apparently Blogger thinks I'm captioning still and won't let me align left or use a real font or even hit enter to start a new paragraph. So that seems like a good place to call it a post.