Twenty-Five Pictures a Day Is 9,125 a Year

After the fifth Rainbow Ogre, she wrote, she knew they did not all need keeping. The pictures were enjoyed in the moment and recycled each week. The special ones, mostly from nursery, went on the kitchen pinboard; the rest of the keepers into a spare drawer in the dining-room dresser. What she would not do was tell other families which of their children’s pictures to throw away.

I have no such scruples. I can tell you exactly which of my children’s pictures to throw away. All of the ones with pasta on.

Other parents are more resourceful. Fiona, writing on her family art blog in Sunderland in 2012, used school and nursery paintings as wrapping paper for presents, more personal, she pointed out, than wrapping paper from Morrisons, and saved the best ones to send to relatives who lived far away.

We tried the relatives. My husband’s aunt in Inverness now owns forty-one paintings of our cat and has stopped picking up.

The recycling box is where it goes wrong. On a 2021 forum thread called Drowning in artwork from school, one parent described their child spotting a picture in the recycling on the way to preschool, and improvising on the spot that it was a present for the bin men. Another child, told honestly that there was not room for everything, accepted it and went off to play. Further down, an adult remembered being hurt, as a child, by a picture thrown away, which is the comment every parent finds at eleven at night.

I used the bin-men line in April. Our daughter, who was five, accepted it immediately. Then she asked what they had sent back.

On Wednesday she made them a picture on purpose: a lorry, a man, a great deal of yellow. On Thursday at twenty to seven I stood at the gate in my dressing gown, holding it, until the crew arrived. The man on the back said cheers and put it on the dashboard.

We now have a standing order. One a week, handed over at the gate. It is the only picture in our house that has never once gone in the recycling.