By Winter D. Prosapio

I am losing the paper war.

Every week our daughters come home with notebooks filled with the week’s projects. Everything from tests to crayon renditions of the food pyramid, it’s all carefully tucked into their backpacks.

At home it joins the mounting pile of paper known as Mount Kill-a-mom-jaro. A mountain that is extremely erosion resistant.

Some time ago I took an idea from a preschool teacher and created portfolio/storage boxes made out of empty pizza boxes. We decorate one for every year and have a nice storage spot for their finest work.

The problem is who gets to define their finest work. I’ve tried to involve them in the selection of their very best work, but if anything, it makes it much worse. Suddenly we are in hour-long conversations about the artistic merit of a page with no more than three quick crayon swipes. To me what appears to be merely routine looping circles, or a practice test, are actually the blood, sweat, and tears of elementary school manifested in black lead marks on white sheets.

I recently decided to cull through the stack, unaware that Mireya, who is in Kindergarten and produces an incredible amount of paper in a given week, would actually LOOK in the trashcan.

I’d been convinced she didn’t even know what the trash can was, given the number of candy wrappers that end up on the floor in the vicinity of, but not actually in, the trash can. Yet, with the awe inspiring power of 5-year-old intuition she inexplicably opened the trash can lid and there were a few pieces of paper. Her papers.

“You threw away my work?!” she shrieked.

“What? No, I didn’t…” I stammered. “Is that your work? What is it doing in there?”

She gave me a look that made it clear that she wasn’t falling for my backpedaling. She marched over to the paper mountain, climbed the ladder and placed her seven sheets of alphabet tracings back on the snow-capped top.

As she grumbled to her sister, I looked at the mountain, and wondered how many pizza boxes this was going to take.

I figure we can open a mini library of congress by the time they hit middle school…