Stick 'Em Up

What is the deal with little girls and stickers?

Kinley is no longer content to simply color, draw or paint. Now all of her beautiful artwork must be adorned with as many stickers as I'll allow....usually right on top of each other and covering everything she just drew.

Having boys, this is a new experience for me. Cainan was never interested in stickers and Ryker was (is) downright afraid of them. You should have seen the look of terror that came in to his eyes every time a Wal-Mart greeter came at him with one of those little yellow smiley faces. The first day of Kindergarten I thought he was going to start crying when he found out that when he turned his very first paper in to his teacher she was going to give him a sticker. I had to go up to her desk with him and explain that he didn't want to turn his paper in if he was going to have to wear a sticker. Weird kid.

You know, when I think back on it, my sister and I were kind of obsessed with stickers as kids too. (Remember Critter Sitters and all of the stickers you could collect? Yeah, I never had one of those :() Jill and I never really had fun, girly, kid stickers but my Dad got lots of bumper stickers and we got to play with those. I still have a bedside table (covered in a table cloth, of course) that I put a "Reagan 80" sticker on 29 years ago. My sister had an old banged up dresser that was so bad my parents even let her put stickers on it. The middle drawer had a big grain bin warning label on it and a few pesticide advertisements too.

As a matter of fact the only reason that we have any stickers around here for Kinley to play with is because I always used them when I was teaching and I had a bunch left over when I quit. All "A" papers got a sticker...making it apparent to the recipient and everyone else in the room that this was a good job. High school kids love stickers as much as the next person. Some of them would peel them off and keep them in their folders as a kind of tally sheet of "A's". Some kids that were never going to get an "A" would beg for stickers for improved performance or perfect attendance. Sticker love is pretty universal, I guess....except for my son, of course.

My sister-in-law, Alyssa, loved her stickers too. When Brian and I were first dating Alyssa was 5 years old. I went with Brian to run some errands. One of the things we had to do was pick up their big console tv from the repair place. We went in to this place that was just floor to ceiling tvs. You could barely walk through the paths in the tvs. Brian said, "Which tv is ours?" I looked at him like, "You're kidding, right?" He said, "Think about it." Sure enough, I found it. It was the one with the big Smurf sticker right on the front.

I guess Kinley is just entering into one more phase of girlhood that I had forgotten even existed. As long as she keeps the stickers on the coloring books and off of the furniture I'm fine with it.