“Mommy – hold out your hand,” the little man asked me.

It was early.  I was still lying in bed.

I held out my hand.

In it he placed a very small object.

His tooth.

“Oh.  Well.  Uh.  Thanks son.”

He grinned – two teeth down on my Last Boy To Lose Teeth.

“Is it still bleeding?  Is there blood on my lip?  I don’t care for the taste of blood.”  He said all of these sentences in rapid succession and ran out of the room to continue whatever he had been doing before his tooth popped right out of his tiny mouth.

I was still lying there, mini tooth in palm.

I don’t save teeth, you guys.

What would I do with over one hundred lost teeth?

I love my children.  Like – I really love them.  I like them.  I enjoy their company.  I chose, on purpose, with basic mental clarity, to stay home all day routinely with them and educate them in place of a teacher who would educate them at a location that is not my home which would thus make my home a very very quiet and restful spot during primary daylight hours.

But I don’t save their lost teeth.

I stay up late some nights and prepare meals and plan lessons and sweep floors and fold mounds of kid attire.

But I don’t save the paper plate crafts or the wooden boats or the colored pages of scenes depicting the miracles of Jesus.

Sometimes I throw those drawings away in the bathroom of the church before they ever even make it to the car.

I’ve tossed out wooden treasure banks five children hammered together at Lowe’s on a Saturday.  I’ve stuffed them under pizza boxes and cereal bags so no underage hoarder would see the carnage and rescue it from the wreckage.

Right now on my kitchen counter is a small round plastic container housing a caterpillar that HAD to be captured because it “looked so much like lichen”.

There are boxes storing wooden bead necklaces and pipe cleaner bracelets that will never see the light of day.

I have framed art on the walls in prominent spaces that my kids have painted and drawn and pasteled.

I have thrown away hundreds of drawings and coloring pages and scraps of colored bits of this and that.

I cannot possibly save them all.

And I cannot possibly be made to feel terrible about this either.

I’m not going to save any teeth.

I’m not weaving a rug out of hair taken from my children’s heads and I have deleted videos and photos when I needed to make more space for other stuff.

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What “special treasure” do you routinely find yourself sliding into the trash while everyone is asleep?

What child offering have you found that you just can’t seem to part with?

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