Good Things Come in Empty Packages

Last week, UPS delivered five boxes of walking shoes for me to test for a story I was writing, and a giant box containing Trapper's cushy new dog bed. In classic glass-half-empty fashion, I was instantly annoyed by the heaps of packing materials and cardboard that I now had to break down and haul off for recycling.

But before I could sigh too deeply, Caitlin and Natalie swooped into the kitchen. "Boxes! Boxes! Can we have them, Mom? Can we?" You'd have thought I was dangling triple-scoop ice cream cones or the latest Webkins.

My kids have seen their share of big brown boxes, yet they continue to have some sort of magnetic attraction to them. Talie took one medium-sized box up to her room and made it her 'desk.' She turned it on its side, neatly set up her markers and paper inside, and decorated the outside with sticky notes that read "NAT." I can barely get her to move it three inches left or right to open her dresser drawers.

Caitlin and Ellie took another box, carved out a door, and played "lobster" with it, alternately playing the poor soon-to-be-boiled alive lobster caught in the cardboard trap and the mighty sternman/woman who hauled the trap out of the wild sea.

But my favorite adaptation fit with the monkey phase that Caitlin and Natalie happened to be in when the boxes arrived. When I went up to their rooms later, I found Cait's toy lemur had new digs — a huge box with a small round hole cut out of the front, liberally taped to her bedroom window. Talie had used about nine yards of masking tape to attach a smaller box half-way up the side of her bunk bed for her blue monkey. Inside, they had stashed baby blankets, board books, and stuffed animals to keep their monkeys happy.

It just goes to show you, sometimes good things come in small packages — and sometimes the good things are the empty packages.