The Bean's Paper Kingdom

Bean has this love of paper. Bits of paper invade my life and home and purse and pants pockets and her pockets and Leslie's pockets, and they get stashed into her purses and the purses get stashed under her bed or in her closet. Bits of paper are everywhere. She will want to save the tags off of clothing, any reciept, movie ticket stubs, envelopes(!), any paper insert that comes with toys or videos, the inserts from my birth control pills, junk mail. Stickers! Stickers are good too. They don't even have to be cute kid stickers, address labels will suffice. She is forever walking around and handing out bits of paper that she has affixed one sticker to, usually the piece of paper is one that has been ripped form a larger piece. She will make "bookmarks" out of any old scrap of paper and then find a book to put it in, so chances are, if you grab one of our many books and open it for a quick perusal? A bit of paper will drift down. Her car seat is crammed with ill gotten recipets and toll booth tickets. Really.
There is much bargaining and talking to throw even one scrap away. Here's how bad it is: at Christmas we had a gift exchange with Leslie's family here at the house. I had to make up a few paper tags with numbers on them to mark the presents for a random drawing. Evelyn still has those numbered bits of paper! Instead of watching the festivities, she went around frantically gathering the number tags up and has kept them God only knows where. I see one occassionally.
The other thing then, is the gifting of these papers. I can recieve at least 10 to 15 bits of paper in a single afternoon. These are usually just torn fragments that mean nothing. I mean really we have to admit that- they are meaningless. OR if you are lucky you get one with an address label or some other sticker on it. AND you are expected to show enthusiasm and gratitude and find a safe place for each and every scrap. It's not just us she gives these things to - it's everyone. Last week Les brought her a stack of Post-it's home. That next Monday she wanted to take them to Gymnastics and give all of the kids on her class a single post-it. ( I said no).
Also this week I imported those tags that you can buy to mark pages in books. These brightly colored things that are a heavenly mix of paper AND sticker? Evelyn was breathless with desire for these things! She was breathing heavy and jumping about as soon as I took them out of the bag. She was fidgety. She was anxious. I was forced to give her her own pack, either that or watch her brains melt out of her ears. I gave her blue. She wanted orange. I haven't heard the end of this yet. I kid you not I have had fifty conversations in three days about these tags. She figured that she wasn't going to get anymore until she used up her blue ones. So she tagged every single page in one of her notebooks. When she realized that a trip to Office Max to replenish her stock was not forthcoming- she recycled them.
Today I snapped. As I was attempting to run the vacuum cleaner in the living room, I was stopped TWICE to receive bits of paper. The second time was it. I turned of the vacuum and got down on her level and face to face broke the bad news, as gently as I could. I had to tell her that other people did not love paper the way that she did, that usually people just threw receipts and tags and such away. That she was no longer allowed to hand out paper unless it was an official piece of art work that she sat down and worked on.
Thursday we will talk about throwing some of her stashes away.
Just like when I banned the game "Restaurant"
(see this post http://beandippin.blogspot.com/2008/08/restaurant-or-mama-takes-stand.html ) I expect that there will be a transition time, then none, and then gradually she will re-establish her paper kingdom but on a much more manageable level. ( To be honest I banned restaurant and never intended to play it again but, it keeps sneaking in somehow-only occasionally though and now with a set menu, and a real waitress pad and her cash register and real recycled reciepts to sign when you pay the bill, and somewhere she has a stash of starlight mints and you get one of those too)