The Field of Reams

Imagine the Atlantic Ocean. Now, replace all that water with paper. Reams and reams of white paper, piled in crooked stacks, adorned with preschool scribbles: failed attempts to spell a name, lopsided squares, smiling stick figures whose legs start at their necks, the letters h-o-m-o written in columns* over and over again. That's deep. That's a lot of paper.

Next, pretend my house is the Titanic. Now you know how dire my situation is. Someone, please summon a Billy Goat Gruff. Preferably the big one.

In our over zealousness to get Kaila writing her ABCs and win her early admission to college, we created a monster. Believe me. This ain't no pulp fiction. It's the painful reality that is depleting the world's forests at a pace only a three-year old could sustain. Somewhere, Al Gore is sighing the mother of all sighs.

At first, we gave Kaila cute little coloring books to write, draw and color in. Next, sheets of plain paper. Then, sheets of colored paper. Oversized paper. Undersized paper. Spiral notebooks. Whole tablets. Half tablets. Six tablets at a time. A chalkboard. (She cried bullshit on that.) The more we fed her paper fix, the hungrier she became. Her appetite for paper is insatiable. It turned into a sickness. We caught her stealing from our printer. The problem has spiraled out of control. We had an intervention.

Us: Kaila, You're using too much paper.
Kaila: What?
Us: You need to slow down.
Kaila: Why?
Us: Al Gore is upset.
Kaila: Who?
Us: Doesn't matter. You can't waste paper.
Kaila: Why? What? Who? Can I just have some more paper?

We were getting nowhere. Even worse, we forgot that we reused paper in our printer. Last Friday, she brought in "pictures" for the preschool teachers. I didn't realize Mike's resume was on the back of each one. Crap. Maybe something productive will come of this.

*Evidently these are the three letters Kaila loves the most. No worries, though. I love H-O-M-Os, too. They always tell you how you really look.