The sad truth is I've been a failure. I haven't lived up to this ideal. We have plenty of craft supplies, but they are not well-organized. When I am in the mood to get crafty, the kids usually aren't. When they are in the mood to get crafty, it's inevitably a bad time for me.
I subscribed to Family Fun when my son was one, in 1998, and I've been getting it ever since. I have saved every issue.
Last summer I decided it was time to purge, time to recycle the magazines and reclaim the space they were eating up. But before I could do that, I leafed through a couple of issues, just for old time's sake. Oops. I found I couldn't let it go. I couldn't get rid of all those cute ideas we hadn't yet had a chance to try. So I started a file instead, something I should have done from the start.
I ask myself why I can't just recycle these, why I must read through them one more time and find things to save. I know much of the magazine's content is online, and it would be easy to find things with a click of a mouse. I can't explain this need of mine to hang on, other than to think that it's all part of that dream I have, and that I can't let it go because that's admitting defeat, or that it's admitting that my children are getting older faster than I want them to, and that maybe we don't have time to do all the things I want to do with them. If I hang on to the ideas, I'm making a promise with myself that we'll get to do it all.