Now I Know.

Last night, Middle One helped me sort through some recycling that’s been lingering in our garage for a very long while. (I’m on a tear to organize things a bit better in that space since we received an entire sporting goods store worth of balls and sleds and stilts and the like from my friend Deb.)

As we sorted the paper and the plastic that had been sitting in the back of the garage for at least a year, we reached the bottom of the bin and came across a V8 bottle that a mouse had apparently decided to call home. It was stuffed full of paper and fluff (and poop) and we both thought it was super duper cool.

Middle One: Olivia, the girl who sits in front of me, is a lot like a mouse.

Me: She looks like a mouse?

Middle One: No. She just takes erasers and chews them until they’re powdery and puts them in her desk in a pile.

Me: What does she do with them after that?

Middle One: Nothing. But if she was a mouse, she could make a nest!

Me: Does she chew all erasers?

Middle One: No, she only likes the soft ones. The hard ones don’t get powdery the same way.

Me: Oh. I didn’t realize there were different chewing properties to erasers. Huh. Learn something new every day, I guess.

Middle One: And the girl who sits on the other side of me? She eats old gum.

Me: Old gum?

Middle One: Yeah, she keeps all sorts of already-chewed gum in her desk in case she needs some. And then she chews it again.

Me: Ooookay… just out of curiosity, what do YOU chew on?

Middle One: PAPER! I like to eat it. I especially like the coloured stuff because it has a different flavour.

Me: Well, at least now I know why you don’t always eat your whole lunch…

It occurs to me that being a grade 2 teacher must be a lot like running a mental institution with all the chewing and gnawing and hiding of assorted non-food items in little piles of shreddedness…