The Night Time Trash People

We all know kids rebel. As a Green Mom, I’d like to believe that my children will absorb at least some of our family’s eco-friendly habits. But sometimes I worry that my green parenting practices might lead my eldest son to rebel like Alex P. Keaton.

So you can imagine how I felt when I overheard this conversation between Big Boy and his cousin, as my DH, his brother, the wives and kids enjoyed a picnic dinner at DC’s Southwest waterfront.

Big Boy: “There’s a lot of trash around here.”

Bigger Boy Cousin: “Let’s pick it up!”

Big Boy: “Awesome, dude. Let’s be the Night Time Trash People. We’ll run around picking up trash.”

Laughing, screaming noise, as two six-year-olds and a nine-year-old run around picking up trash.

On the walk back to metro, Bigger Boy Cousin says, ”You know, there’s too much trash in the world and it’s really bad for the environment.”

Big Boy: “Yeah, because it weighs so much, it could like split the Earth in half. Then the continents would just split down the middle with a big crack.”

Bigger Boy Cousin: “Yeah, and then the world would heat up too much and there would be no oxygen and we would just vaporize and die.”

Big Boy: “Yeah, then we’d just float around like floating skeletons like aliens or something. Cool. We’d all be alien floating skeletons.”

At this point, I made a mental note to make sure that we weren’t terrorizing the kids with overheard tales of looming eco-tragedies.

The next morning, Big Boy informed me that he needed to make posters telling people to recycle. He wants to hang them on trees all around the neighborhood.

I wondered about the wisdom of hanging posters from trees. But off he ran, soon to come back with 60 copies expertly run off on my office printer. NOT double-sided. I took a deep breath, and decided his heart was in the right place.

And we’re off to hang posters. Anyone need about forty extras?

— Lynn

Copyright 2008 OrganicMania

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