Pistachio Pets

Every parent has been there. You spend hundreds of dollars on toys and electronic devices and the next thing you you know, your child has spent a full day playing with a stick and gum wrapper. No doubt, there is definitely comfort in knowing that your technology-bred child still has the raw imagination to create an ocean out of felt squares or a card game out of clothing tags. In other words, the enjoyment received from witnessing a healthy imagination in our children is probably the one-and-only reason on God's green earth that we hard-working parents would turn a blind eye to an electronics purchase not getting its money's worth.

To elaborate even further, the joy of a flourishing imagination in our children has a way of also bringing out the child within ourselves. One example being when we discover something that we immediately know our child would find absolutely amazing. Hence, the title of this post. 

My husband was eating pistachios a few nights back, when he had that exact mind-of-a-child type of epiphany and randomly asked me for a permanent marker. The next thing I knew, he had turned an empty pistachio shell into a little cartoon head and told me to give it to our six year old daughter the next morning (she was already in bed). Low and behold, before I even had time to wake up, she found it on my nightstand, giggling with joy at what her daddy had made. 

That was the beginning of Aidia's love of what she has since named "Pistachio Pets". She created a carry-along case that included pistachio shells and thin permanent markers of different colors and took it to the playground after school. The children gathered in droves, drawing little animal faces of their liking on each shell. It created the biggest excitement on the playground that we had ever seen- even more excitement than the time Aidia brought her American Girl doll or Butterscotch Pony. Pistachio shells.

It just goes to show you that it can be the smallest (and cheapest) of things that have the ability to create for us those defining moments when, as a parent raising kids in a technological world, we have just been given the gift of "my kid is gonna be alright, after all".