I live with stationery addicts

My kids can’t resist stationery. Is this a problem in your house, too? They are always pestering me to buy them more gel pens and coloured pencils and crayons and paper and special notebooks and felts and chalks and who knows what else. And green-handled scissors and sproingy erasers and rainbow pencil grips and paper clips shaped like narwhals.

Side note: For a long time, I thought narwhals were a made-up thing. I am still not convinced they are real. Nature is weird, man. shakes head

Side side note: I seriously just looked up the narwhal page on Wikipedia and read the whole thing and yep, still not convinced they’re real.

Anyway, back to the point, which is that my kids love stationery a bit too much. They love stationery the way I love donuts. As in, we’ll be driving down the road on our way somewhere, and I’ll see a donut shop and say, “Ooh, donuts!” and immediately pull into the donut shop and buy a mixed dozen. (I even did this once on the way to a wedding. I am not ashamed.) Except with my kids, it’s Office Max and Warehouse Stationery and Gordon Harris and anything else that may stock pens, paper, etc.

The thing is, my kids already have so much stationery that they can never find the thing they need at the time they need it, which means they think they need more stationery. There are approximately 17,852 coloured pencils in this house and one afternoon last week my son was moaning that he couldn’t find green. “Dude, the Easter Bunny brought you a new box of coloured pencils in your Easter basket and I am CERTAIN there was a green one in there,” I told him sternly.

“But I can’t fiiiiiiiiind it!” he wailed.

“Guess you’re gonna have to use yellow and blue and MAKE green,” I threatened. I’m a super-tough mum, obvs.

There was more teeth-gnashing and complaining about the lack of green, and I spent half-an-hour ratting through coloured pencils to try to find green, and apparently the seven green coloured pencils I located were not the RIGHT shade of green. I gave up. I waded through the coloured pencils littering the floor and left the room.

On the weekend my husband took Miss 13 along to the supermarket and when they weren’t home an hour later, I rang his mobile. “We’re just at the bookstore,” he told me. “They’re having a stationery sale.”

“Can you bring home just one single green coloured pencil?” I asked.

Katherine Granich

Editor, Tots to Teens

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