What's Hiding Under Her Bed

My husband and I recently discovered that our five-year-old daughter, Madelyn, has been hiding things under her bed. Specifically, she's hiding dolls she does not want to share with her sister, cash (I found a $10, a $5, and some singles - where she got this, I have no idea!!), and literally hundreds of drawings, colorings, or printouts.

Maddie is a absolutely obsessed with drawing and art. She probably draws at least 10-15 pictures a day and colors just about that many per day in a coloring book. She also likes to get on the computer and play "design" games. If given the chance, she will print out not only every page she designed, but also every web page she finds "pretty." She has been warned to keep the printing to an absolute minimum because we have been paying out the yin-yang in paper and expensive color printer ink, but apparently she has been printing more than we thought and has been hiding the evidence under her bed.

Madelyn is incredibly proud and protective of her collection of drawings, so today we took her out to buy her storage and filing cabinets for her most prized pieces with the understanding that she would go through her stash and try to narrow down her collection if possible. She began this task about an hour ago when she asked me to help her decide which ones to keep. I was absolutely floored when I started to actually go through her papers.

This beautiful and talented child had not only kept her prized drawings and printouts, but to my surprise she had torn out pages from her coloring book that I had colored. They were nothing special (in my eyes), but they had apparently meant the world to her. I asked her why she had torn them out and hid them under her bed, and she said, "Because you colored them, Mommy." She could remember everything about the day I had colored each of those pictures with her. In addition to the coloring pages, there were random pieces of paper that I had written on, all of which Madelyn could recollect the day and reason. One was a piece of scratch paper on which she and I had played Tic Tac Toe in the waiting room at her dentist's office.

My heart just burst at this discovery, partly because it touched me so deeply that she loved me so much. But her actions also made me wonder if she kept these mementos because our time together is so limited and hurried with me being a working mom and our crazy, over-booked schedules. Is coloring with her mom and special time so rare that she felt she had to protect and treasure those "moments" into a collection under her bed because who knows when it would happen again?

Regardless, my little girl reminded me tonight just how precious our time together as a family really is. Memories are being built right now and there really are no "small" moments to them - or me. I need to slow down and savor these golden years while I still can.

So while Madelyn immortalizes these memories in her collection of papers under her bed, I will make an effort to be better about collecting them here, which was my purpose when I started this blog.