Nostaglia

We are making the most of the week that the boys are away by trying to clean things up and get things organized around here. There are quite a few totes and boxes of stuff that we still had packed from our move a few years ago, that needed to be gone through and put away.

I didn’t even open the boxes and totes marked “Keep – Baby stuff” because I knew that it would cause Tom to find me on the floor of the garage with tears in my eyes, crying like a babbling fool. I stayed way clear of them, but I did open the box that held the contents of our “junk” drawer in NJ, which lo and behold brought me across these

and that got me remembering about how these things were all the rage and provided hours and hours of entertainment and I cursed these things

thinking that I was certain that I would be vacuuming them up long after my boys had left for college. Note: I still have found them around the house, which is pretty amazing since we’ve moved and all, but I still think that Legos will follow me to my grave. There in the casket will be some long lost Lego part that managed to survive.

I even came across a few of these

which reminded me of the time when my brother (unmarried and without children of his own) thought it would be hysterical to help the boys put these all over my house. For months (and dare I even say years) these little green men could be found in closets, cabinets, on top of things and just about anywhere a little green army guy might be able to hide. Ah, Bill, lucky you have girls – wait- do they make some female version of little green army men that comes in a bag of thousands? I’ll have to look into that.

Coming across the icons of their childhood reminds me of how quickly they have turned from babies to toddlers to little boys and now teenagers. It made me a little sad and very nostalgic to remember my teenagers as the little boys who were content to build castles with Playmobil or Legos for hours and hours and  and battle each other in last year’s Halloween costumes with swords.