The Magpie

Its funny when you watch your kids grow and develop their personalities just how varied they become when they draw their genetic make-up from the same place. They have their similarities, but there are idiosyncrasies there as well.

Kids like to collect stuff, that’s a given. Certainly all of our kids do. But Sam is the magpie in the family. He’s the one that will always bring something home. I can live with that, but it’s the things that he decides to bring home that never ceases to amaze me.

I’ve never met someone with such a penchant for collecting crap! We spend two hours at Michael’s cricket after Sam finishes on a Saturday. That’s two hours in which he is able to scour the surrounding area for something fun and interesting.

Like the piece of rusty steel that obviously wasn’t any good for its intended purpose (or for any new purpose either (as far as I could see)) any more. I can’t remember how many times I asked him not to bring it home, but I wasn’t happy when I stepped out the back door and tripped over it!

Last week he found a couple of scraps of a watch band. Well they absolutely had to come home! I mean that wasn’t just junk, it was shiny junk.

It doesn’t matter where we go, Sam finds something to bring home, whether it’s a bottle top, a stick, a rock, or the claw of a crab that’s caught his fancy, its coming with us.

And the really amazing thing is, that once it gets home, he doesn’t necessarily lose interest in it. And the most likely place you’ll find the item at some later date? In his bed! I’ve never seen a child so happy to sleep on a fraction of his bed whilst the rest is full of accumulated childhood treasures.

Sometimes I can see the fascination with an object and I know that I’m just being a stuffy old bugger because I don’t want the crap in my house that is the end result, but seriously, you have to see some of this stuff to see just how crappy it is!

Having said that, I do love the boy dearly!