The boys and I finished their leaf project this morning. I saw their bright colorful letters and my heart cracked open with feeling touched by their creativity and initiative. Before that one of the boys had been on the couch coughing. Every couple of years there’s some sickness or bug that lasts longer and hangs on more than the typical timeframe. The cough was repeatedly gag-inducing to where the bucket was getting regularly used.

And then they feel better. We wondered where we could put it. I was initially thinking between the bookshelves in the schoolroom but then one of them suggested hanging it over the bookshelf in the living room hallway. I liked that idea. The top of the bookshelf was empty, and a little shorter than waist high. So we wondered what else we could put there. My one son is in a ceramics art class this semester. We found one of his projects.

We have similar items from when my daughter took that class. I brought two of them out from the kitchen drawer designated for miscellaneous trinkets. To top it off I found a picture from 2020 that I’d printed of all four of them from the first day of school. They were posing in the hammocks, one hung above another with two kids in each one. Everything doesn’t have to be displayed, but I like when we find a good use for things.