Kindergarten Garbage Crafts

    My child is rambunctious, creative, and wild. She loves making new things and can see value in almost anything, much like her mother. Every school day, she experiences another wonderful journey of knowledge with her classmates and teachers.

    Problem? The kindergarten she goes to keeps sending her home with some new item she had made from garbage. It's clean and recycled, which is great in that I love finding better ways to reduce waste and reuse what we have, but horrible in that our home is already cluttered with hundreds, likely thousands, of dollars worth of real toys. She has so much stuff that we have run out of space to store it all and are going to go through a whole re-organization process as soon as I can wrap my head around how to fix up the rest of the house. 

    If we don't have room for the expensive, exciting toys, what am I supposed to do with toys made from garbage?

This is "Bunny".

    I started assuming that the toys brought home were meant to be quietly disposed of while the child is out of the home and never seen again. Kids forget, and kids with more forget more, so it seemed likely that the items could quietly disappear without offending any delicate senses and this worked on many small yogurt-container items, never seen or mentioned again.

    So when my kid brought home this "bunny" made entirely out of a large plastic egg carton with attached flat eyes and ears as well as some confetti inside, it was only a matter of hours before the thing was sliced into smaller pieces (so as not to be recognized if accidentally spotted) and hidden at the bottom of the plastic garbage bag. Like an idiot, I chose to put the confetti to the side, perhaps for a future project or something to remember the massive bunny creature by. I do not know what I was thinking but if you are in this position SAVE NOTHING.

    She found the confetti and asked what happened to Bunny. I told her the first thing I could think of, which was that he had chosen to take a trip to the moon. She cried. I felt like a monster. I still feel like a monster, but no more a monster than I would be if I kept the thing and tripped over it in her room, smashing it to pieces in front of her instead.

    My little one eventually calmed down and I put the work out on social media that I had a need for some free and voluntary photo editing work and why. My very own mom came to the rescue, creating a number of postcard-ready pictures that I will print in the coming weeks. The plan now is to document Bunny's interplanetary journey, writing small, easy to read descriptions on the back of each postcard so she can practice reading and learn some more science week by week. When he gets to the end of the solar system, he will say goodbye. Maybe by then, she'll be ready to say goodbye too.