Things I'm not allowed to throw out...

What do these three things have on common? Haha...yes, well, I already gave you the answer, but seriously, I think I should explain. I'm a sentimental person with a sentimental child, yet I know what a burden it can be to have the desperate need to keep everything you ever come in contact with, so I'm trying to help Jacob break free of this illness while he's still young. I have two options when I want to get rid of something that concerns him: I can casually ask if it's ok to throw something out. If he says yes then I'm home free. However, odds are it won't work and I've just signaled to Jacob that said item is now 'hot', as in Mom's got her eye on it so you must keep a constant radar going as to its whereabouts. I'll try to bury these things in the garbage when Jacob isn't looking but somehow he knows. I'll walk in the room an hour later and he's standing there next to the trash can, ankle deep in garbage, holding the chewed block/pencil eraser/broken toy, all covered in slime from whatever it was burried under. "How did this get in here?" he asks in a tone that says, please lie to me because I can't bear to think that my own mother would do such a thing. The second option isn't much better because it involves quietly sneaking the item to the back corners of my closet, a deep cupboard, or somewhere equally remote. I place it there telling myself that I'll wait about a month and if Jacob doesn't notice it's gone then I can finally get rid of it. The latter doesn't really yield better results because chances are when the designated month is up, I've forgotten about it too.

In the picture above are the current items in 'holding'. Top left you have Jacob's leftover breakfast. He's saving it. Top right is the head of Nemo which stuck out one side of the bottle of bath bubbles we finished six months ago. There was a back half too. I successfully tossed it last week. Bottom right you have Jacob's 'baby corn' which has been sitting in the bottom of the fridge for three weeks. Jacob was husking some corn on the cob a few weeks back and out of one of them popped this extra 'baby' corn. It was love at first sight. And there should be a bright coral, foamy starfish at the bottom left of the picture but here's what happened to it after I set the items up and before I got to take the picture:

This was something that was given to Jacob by Jen and Dan just after Christmas. It was one of those that you stick in the water and they expand to so many times the original size. They had long been taken out of the water and shrunk back to normal size. And actually, they had been in the trash twice. And I got caught. Because of his sheer determination to save the starfish I was prepared to let Jacob keep them for the rest of his life. At dinner tonight he spotted them up on a high shelf and climbed to get them. That's actually the reason I got thinking about this topic. There were two of them. Before I even brainstormed this post, Mango had eaten the first one and Jacob, very unsentimentally, placed the remains in the garbage. So I'm pretty sure it's ok that I did the same with the remains to the second one (seen above) after Jacob had already gone to bed. But dear God, what have I let happen?

Here's what went down after I took the first picture:

Can you see what's happening? Having finished off the starfish, Mango is back for more. She takes the corn and - I let her! I think she had that thing swallowed in ten seconds flat. I opted to take a picture, rather than save my son's beloved corn and in the morning I will pay the price.