of papers, clothes and toys that rushes in faster than you can possibly toss it back out. Before we had kids, my husband's and my dishes, books and records were all the same sizes and fit neatly into racks. But our kids' stuff involves minuscule, furry, pointy, highly complex objects, of whose 5,000 critical pieces we are always missing precisely one. Nothing fits together. Nothing is uniform. Nothing is tidy--especially if you're talking about the fastest-growing pile in our house: kids' artwork.
Why save any of it? These papers and objects are a window into the way your child sees the world. Right now, they are a measure of his development, his likes and dislikes, and a daily source of decorations for your refrigerator. In the years to come, they will be important to your child, who'll want to see what he was like when he was little.
As I sought advice from teachers and other parents about how they kept their kids' creativity from driving them out of the house, I began to hear a common refrain: you must edit heavily. It's crucial, they told me. If you want your children to reach twelfth grade with only a reasonable amount of artwork (rather than enough to rehang the Louvre), you have to be choosy. It sounded a little hard-line to me, but I decided to give this approach a try. Weeding through our stacks, I tried to keep only what we might display, reuse or could not live without, and get rid of the rest. After some initial hesitation, I got on a roll. I tossed, I saved, I was converted. Not only are we able to use our guest room for guests again, but without all the excess clutter, I've also found we can better appreciate the paintings and drawings we keep.
