Treasuring Your Children’s Art

Spring is here, and so too spring cleaning…

Now, if you have little kids, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say Gadzillion Bits And Pieces Of Art And Craft Things They Bring Home From School. And like me, you’ll be loathe to throw it all away because Treasure Your Child’s Work (for those of you who like myself didn’t get it the first time, you’re likely to get an email or note or something that instructs and reminds you to do that, somewhere in the correspondence when your pre-schooler/ kindergartener starts bringing stuff home.)

(I like to add, As In, Even If It’s – It’s – What Is It Again?? (Actually a lot of it is going to be I Love It!! What Is It?? And they will be very adamant it is…. a butterfly or a rocket or whatever and you will secretly possibly never see it but will agree with whatever they tell you it is anyways. Ever thought they might be messing with us grownups about that? Let’s See What I Can Get Away Telling Mummy That Glop Of Paint Is! 😀 Early Kindergartener Rockstar once handed me this… Thing With Crazy Lines Drawn All Over It and said it was a….. I dunno, house or something. I turned it this way and that, up side down, and he always saw the windows in the same place, the roof and doors in the same place whichever way I turned it and could tell me the house was now upside down etc….. but I never saw the house :D)

So anyway we’re working on this:

Almost everything is an Ikea frame – among others the cardboard-backed ones that are very light and can easily be velcro-ed to the wall with those non-paintwork-damaging 3M stick-ons from Japan home. Caveat on the regular heavy Ikea frames with the glass – the glass shatters very easily, and often the moment they fall off a wall (one even broke while I was framing something, years ago) BUT the lightweight cardboard ones which employ plastic instead of glass don’t break easily and are real value for money. Plus, they last a long time – a lot of ours are reused from up to 5 years ago and still like new.

Wait – what are those two large ones again?

The Rockstars’ old Year 2 Show and Halloween party costumes.

Rockstar wore those as Archangel Michael back when he was in Year 2; The Miss was quick to take over the wings – and go nuts with the glitter paint to turn them into her own costume as a garden Disco Butterfly for her first school Halloween Dressup party.

I spent a day coming down this street…

At this little local shop…

…where this uncle…

…… breaks out a large box with more than a hundred mounting board samples for me to match…

…to these frames..

…to mount the Rockstars’ old costumes.

Work in progrèss…

This Uncle’s shop was the first one open each morning I came by.

“Been doing this here 50 years,” Uncle tells me proudly. “You can write the cheque for me in English,” no worries. (Obviously he has all those local Ma and Pa shop-looking receipts and scribbles everything in Chinese I can’t read – but when I hesitated, he assures me he can cater to English speaking customers as well.)

The customer before me when I return is a tall man with an English accent, accompanied by an Asian lady deep in Cantonese conversation about how to frame soccer jerseys. When I mention I’m here to collect my kids’ costumes he nods. “He’s framed a bottle of wine for me before. Long time ago…”

ps:

And this old Nespresso Machine in the corner of the entire “art composition” on our wall…

(This was another memory… I gave the machine to Kings shortly after we got to Hong Kong – that’s like 10 years ago… It was the first time he had to go on a strict diet after a routine medical, and I remember buying this model – quite expensive for coffee machines so long ago, but I wanted it to be the Cube series with the cup storage – thinking it would cheer him up because at least he could drink good coffee! Seriously ok <sheepish>)