A picture worth rescuing from the recycle bin

With Kindergarten now in full swing...Big Sis comes home with piles of papers, artwork, and handouts daily. I try to be "on top" of cleaning out her take home folder, ensuring I don't miss something important, like the dates for show and share, school pictures, and whether the hot lunch is pizza or roast beef the next day. I am not a pack-rat by nature...I find myself getting overwhelemd with too much "stuff" of any type and so therefore, am a big fan of the recycle bin...especially for these school handouts Big Sis comes home with. After I take a gander at what she's learned for the day, and ask her about her work, I realize we'll be getting more papers the next day...and the next, and dutifully toss them in the recycle bin.

Last week she came home from school with a picture she had drawn in art class. It didn't seem unusual to me...it showed Mommy and Daddy holding hands (we always have dark hair in the pictures). Daddy was holding a blond child (I figured that was Sissy) and then there was Big Sis, holding my hand (a much shorter version of the drawing of me but with a head of blond hair, and of course, a bow). Even Summer dog was right there with us, tongue out and all. There was the typical Kindergarten elements to a good picture...our house formed from a square with a triangle roof, the grass, and the sky. But under the blue clouds you could see purple figures drawn.

Just to ensure I was going over what she had learned and spent her day doing, I asked her "Hey tell Mommy about your pretty picture." She explained what I had suspected...pointing to each thing she said "here is you Mommy, then Daddy, Me, Summer, and Daddy is holding Sissy. Here is our house." Then as she pointed to the purple figures in the clouds she said "and here is Grandpa Jack and Kimmy...Nana's dog who died...they are up in Heaven with Jesus."

That day I was surely thanking God I had not thrown her precious picture away. I need to take a picture of it for extra safe keeping too. To me that day, regardless of how many sight words she was still struggling with, or the fact that she is now refusing to eat hot lunch the majority of the time because "her tray is too heavy"...she had the important things down.