Okay, not all. But a lot of it. A lot of "stuff."
Being a parent involves throwing a lot of stuff away. Stuff you would have thought of as treasures as a kid.
Plastic tops.
Sticky wall crawlers.
Kids meal toys. Lots and lots of kids meal toys.
All those four packs of red, blue, green and yellow crayons you get at restaurants that don’t give out toys with their kids meals.
Temporary tattoos.
Broken crayons.
Stickers.
Dried up play-doh.
Dried up markers.
Those don’t hurt.
But some things do.
Scribbled drawings on a million scraps of paper.
The 1,000th origami throwing star he made.
All the drink pull tabs and rocks and bits of string and sticks and candy wrappers that he slips into his pockets during the day.
You can’t keep it all any more than you can keep him from growing up.
But you keep some of it.
Tokens of a childhood that goes too fast.
And he stays your boy, no matter how big he gets.
