I Can Hardly Contain Myself

   I’m fairly certain that most if not all the toys in my house arrived in a container of some sort. I am positive that extra containers have been purchased, recycled, borrowed and given to us to help store the massive amounts of various items that need containing. Yet we still seem to have a container issue. The issue is not that there is a shortage. The issue is more about how the concept of “using things as they were intended” goes against our kids’ nature.

   Containers never seem to actually contain anything. Or they contain the wrong things. Cats, for example. Sometimes they contain our kids, in such imaginative uses like cars, or beds, or trampolines. But not for very long, mostly because household containers are generally not designed to withstand the sheer destructive force that our children are capable of wielding. I can easily imagine an engineer in charge of designing a sturdy container saying, “This container has a 300 cubic feet capacity, can support a load of 600 lbs and can withstand 3,000 lbs of external pressure.”

   And his boss saying, “That’s good, because I’m going to let my three year-old play in it.”

   To which the engineer would reply, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. No one said anything about making this thing child proof!”

   I think there should be some sort of law that states that any toy intended for use by children should only be allowed to have three separate parts. The way things are now, everything has, at minimum, 500 pieces which require a container. We have containers for doll parts, dolls, Legos, Lincoln Logs, balls, trucks, plastic lizards, puzzles, costumes, and anything else that you can imagine. Unfortunately, all the items intended for those containers are being stored in purses, recycled lemonade tubs, baskets, backpacks, paper bags, jars, cardboard boxes, Ziploc bags, towels, socks, and anything else the kids happen to come across when it’s time to clean up. This leaves us to wonder, “What are we going to do with all these empty containers? Maybe we need some sort of container to contain all these other containers.”

   Fortunately, no container stays empty for long. As soon as a kid sees any object that can hold another object, they will find something to fill it. At the risk of sounding too scientific, kids love putting stuff into things. Unfortunately, those things tend to be whatever is at hand with little regard to what items should be stored together, or whether the items are dangerously sharp, vitally important screws that some appliance can’t work without, or likely to rot. There is also no concern for locating these objects later.

   This problem becomes more obvious at bed time, when everyone is tucked in, and someone cries for a miniature stuffed animal that they want that was just here a minute ago, but is now probably tucked into a backpack full of completely unrelated items, then buried in another container and has probably been left in the basement.

   The other day, one of my daughters had a pile of magnetic dollhouse stuff scattered across the floor. I asked her to clean them up, and of course the box that the pieces were supposed to be in had long ago been damaged beyond normal use. (How a 40 lb. girl can break a thick, Plexiglas panel into multiple pieces is beyond me.)

   I turned my attention to other tasks and when I turned back around, lo and behold, she had cleaned up the dollhouse pieces into a container. Unfortunately, it was the container which, until a few minutes prior, had contained the crayons and markers. (This container was actually intended to be some sort of jewelry box, I think.)

   “Where did you put the crayons?” I asked her.

   They were in the only logical place one would dump a huge box of crayons and uncapped, ink-dripping markers, the couch. With a sigh, I asked her to clean up the crayons. The next logical step for her was to dump out a container of plastic food to make a container for the crayons – the ones she could find that hadn’t worked their way through the multiple gaps and openings between cushions, of course. Dumping the thousands of plastic food pieces into another container was unacceptable. They had to be dumped loose, onto the floor. And around and around we go.

   It seems to go against the laws of nature for things to stay contained. Even (or especially) people. When we are infants, we get put into cribs which we eventually climb out of, despite the dangers. High chairs and car seats quickly become too restrictive. Baby gates designed to keep us in a specific place become a challenge that must be overcome. People don’t like to be labeled because the human personality is far too complex to neatly fit into one specific category. Businesses often look for employees to think outside the box. Everything in our being rebels at the thought of being contained.

   So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that our children don’t instinctively want to keep their toys in the correct place, or in any sort of containment unit at all, for that matter. On the contrary, I think they see it as their duty to free any contained objects from their imprisonment. Their theory is that if it is physically possible for an item to be broken down into individual components, then by all logic, it should be.

   Since becoming a parent, I have learned a few things about containers: 1. It doesn’t really matter how many you have. There are either too many, or not enough, and either way, nothing will ever be kept in them for very long; 2. Try to be patient with your children when they don’t do things by the book – they are only expressing their creativity; and 3. Never underestimate the raw destructive power of a 3-year old.