Misty Water Colored Laminates

I'm on a bit of lamination kick.  You know the stuff - that plastic covering you can put on ID's and photos.   It started out harmless enough.  The boys had made some beautiful paper Easter eggs I wanted to keep for decorations, so voila!  Lamination was the easy answer.  Then I started going through my boxes of saved artwork, carefully selecting pieces that might not make it through the ages. 

Honest Abe is a good example.  He looks more like Jack Skellington in A Nightmare Before Christmas than our 16th president.  Those spindly paper legs would certainly not survive without an inadvertent amputation sometime over the next 50 years.  So Abe has been added to the laminate pile for this weekend.  The people at Lakeshore Learning think I'm a teacher instead of a crazy mom, so mum's the word on that one.  I think I get a discount.

The nice shiny flat aesthetics of a laminated piece appeal to my OCD/sensory nature.  Everything feels the same.  Tears are mended under the forgiving heat of laminate. Abe can live forever in this state, like King Tut but without all the curses and molten guts and such. Hope no one is eating by the way.

I have never kept a piece of hair from a first haircut.  I have never recorded anything in a baby book.   I am not sure what each of their first words were.  But their artwork?  I hoard it in droves.  I have a feeling my house is going to look like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where they wheel the ark into that big storage facility.  That will be my house - all the boys' artwork cataloged and kept forever. 

Honest Abe was a recent creation by Jack.  He's developed a keen interest in presidential history and can give you some detail about each president.  I told him that Lincoln was my favorite and he made this paper version at school as a gift to me.  When Jack is a teenager one day and doesn't want me anywhere near him, I will dig up Abe and remember the sweet little boy who always just wanted to make his mom happy.  No tuft of baby hair could fill me with that kind of warmth.

And that is why I laminate.