See! they did come in handy.

I have a box in my closet that holds what I affectionately call "the junk from my childhood". Over the years this box has been downsized and things get taken out and thrown away. So hopefully this box now holds only the really important things.It holds a few journals from my early years. One in particular is always funny to read. It is written in my parent's hand writing but they wrote exactly what said when I was only 3 or 4 years old. So it is my voice but their writing. This box is also home to a bunch of the pictures I took on trips that I went on or of friends and family as well as school pictures over the years. For some reason I kept a song book from girls camp when I was 12 years old. There is also a few awards that I won and little items given to me from friends, family or teachers. When looking through the papers I have kept I found a few old report cards and school papers I wrote. I even found my SAT and ACT scores in there. Very important things to save! But two things from this box came out yesterday. They are probably the oldest items I have in this box.
The book of stories is from the Fall of my 3rd grade year and the Marvelous Me Book is from 2nd Grade. I dragged out the box yesterday to find these little treasures because Sophie was in tears yesterday during our drawing lesson. She was frustrated that things just didn't look right and she kept saying she just wasn't good at drawing. She likes to compare her drawings to mine and she gets so frustrated when hers don't look as good as mine. No matter how many times I tell her that it takes a lot of practice and years of work to be able to draw well, she just doesn't believe me. So I went in search of some of my early artwork. And these two books were perfect.
Here is one of the Halloween stories from the book of stories I wrote and illustrated in the Fall of 1983. Great work!

Here are a few of the pictures included in the Marvelous Me book that I did in 2nd grade.

You would never think that these drawings done by a little 7 year old girl who dreamed of being a "Jokey" (Jockey) would later get an art degree.

Now take a look at my 7 year old's art work. Here is one she did for fun this week.
A very good drawing of a viking ship!

And here is one of the drawings that she was crying about. For our drawing lesson this week we did a few practice warm-ups and then tried to draw birds. The book gave us some very specific drawing instructions to follow. I loved her birds but she thought they just weren't good enough. They didn't look exactly like the ones in the book. And she didn't like me giving any suggestions on things she could do differently to make them look more like the ones in the book. This is when I pulled out my old drawings and showed her how much better she is at drawing than I was at her age. She loved looking through the books and pointing out all my misspellings and she laughed at my silly drawings. She thought my stories were pretty boring. I guess even then I wasn't headed to a literary career. But she did have to admit that my hand writing was easier to read than hers and one of the stories was written in cursive.

This experience reminded me to make sure I save some of these great drawings and some of her work so she too can pull them out later in life to show to her kids. Thanks mom for saving these for me. I am glad that she didn't save everything because I really don't have space for boxes and boxes of "Junk from my childhood" but one box with a few things will hopefully be able to show the journey one traveled and what was important at the time.
Every time I dig through this box I find little treasures that I didn't realize I saved. And of course there are still things in this box I have no idea why I am still holding on to them.