explaining the blog header

this boy cracks me up. last week, i asked his sister if she'd noticed more pencils around the house lately. it used to be that you had to hunt for one of those yellow sticks in our home. she paused a moment and said that yes, in fact, she had noticed that as well. now if these were brand new, long, hardly used pencils, i wouldn't have thought twice about it. i would have just assumed one of the kids hadn't managed to get their new pencils to school yet. but these pencils were obviously used, they were shorter, the erasers had been used, some even had broken lead, so i knew something was awry.

when ethan got home, i asked him about the sudden proliferation of pencils. he smiled sheepishly. then he began to tell me the glories of finding pencils in middle school. there are pencils on the floor everywhere you look! he doesn't pick them up in the bathroom though (THANK GOODNESS!), but everywhere else is fair game. he figures if you drop your pencil and you don't retrieve said pencil, you're forfieting your need for that pencil. and ethan's always been the sentimental type, so it totally makes sense that he would pick up the lonely pencils and bring them to a safe and loving home. he had noticed that he was amassing quite the collection (something else he's famous for–collecting collections), and decided he wanted to see just how many pencils he could bring home. i was discussing this subject with ethan's principal, he said there certainly are a lot of pencils in the hallways of the middle school, but his solution was to deposit any pencils he finds in the math classrooms. he knows they'll go to good use there! so i think ethan and i need to talk about this.