(photograph © Kiwidutch)
Back in the mid 1990′s when I got my work contract converted to a permanent contract, Himself decided to take the plunge and set up his own business as a freelance translator.
It’s a tough line business with lots of competition but since at the time we didn’t have children and our household now had one guaranteed income we decided it was a good time to see Himself’s new business could sink or swim.
Full of enthusiasm Himself went to several specialist office supply shops and came home with an impressive looking box full of equipment he thought he might need. Paper-clips, stapler, staples, tape, post-it notes, pens, mailing envelopes, floppy disks (yep… remember them?) , rolls of paper for the calculator with the print-out function, seals for sworn translations, official stamps, letterhead paper, business cards and various other bits and bobs.
Fast forward to 2012.
I arrive home from work and find that Himself and the kids have been spending a wet half-term school holiday day pottering around in the house. I quickly spy a startling sight in our living room that I can’t say I’m too thrilled about… the TV cupboard we keep the TV on and antique desk are covered wall-paper style with little post-it notes which are in turn decorated with little drawings and scribbles.
They are everywhere… it looks like the post-its went feral and went on a breeding spree … and despite some of the sweet little drawings (on just a few of them), most have only scribbled lines and they look awful.
Himself is in the kitchen… I go and ask him what’s going on and that while I love our kids artwork, I am really not happy with it on dressers and cupboards that are almost 100 years old. Himself nonchalantly replies that Little Mr, has been happily busy for at least the last hour now and I should relax and enjoy his handiwork.
So I then inform Himself that Little Mr has also pretty much wallpapered with post-its all the cupboard and door woodwork in the house that Himself has spent must of last year sanding and painting… and lo and behold ‘“relaxed” would not be the word I would use as Himself bolted out of the kitchen with a horrified look on his face.
It turns out that one of the tasks Himself undertook on this day was to clean out the drawers in his office desk. Unearthed from the very back of one of the drawers was a bundle of now very old post-it notes from that 1990′s shopping spree… the entire bundle of them still intact in their plastic wrapper in fact.
Himself, realising that if he hadn’t used any of them in more than 15 years that he probably never would, so he put them in a pile of stuff to be donated to the Kringloopwinkel (second hand shop) and it’s from this pile that Little Mr. seized them to use in his “artistic” endeavours.
Later, after dinner and a large post-it removal exercise from various rooms upstairs, I came into our bedroom and my heart sank when I saw yet another post-it on one of our cupboard doors. I looked around… Fortunately, this time there was just the one. (Little Mr. said he was “writing letters” on some of them but after a while he got tired of writing real words so the scribbled ones were just “pretend words”). I get closer and see that instead of scribble, this one has real words on it… I pick it up, read it and my heart melts…
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
Kids… don’t you just love ‘em?
