No Dumpster Diving Allowed

We had a rather unusual case of trauma yesterday. The county had delivered several of the "spring clean-up" dumpsters throughout the neighborhood as they do every year. The first oddity for Mason, the official "garbage truck watcher", was that the truck left the dumpster behind. He kept telling me the garbage truck came apart.

The second problem was the disposal of a very broken office chair. The chair snapped in half a few years ago, and we weren't sure how to properly dispose of it. It's been sitting off to the side of our office unused while we tried to decide. I forgot to take it out during the spring clean last year, and as Mason has become more aware, he likes to twirl it around when he's playing. Apparently, he's become quite attached. When I took it out to the dumpster between our house and the neighbor's house, he watched from the porch in horror. When I pitched the chair over the edge into the dumpster, he started screaming. He was standing on the porch, purple in the face, and I was so sure our neighbors were going to call and report some form of child abuse. When I picked him up, he brokenly told me he wanted the chair back.

Eventually, he asked to see the chair. He then told me "Take it out and get tape." Mason discovered scotch tape a few months ago and thinks it will fix everything. I told him the chair couldn't be fixed with tape, that we couldn't fix it at all, and the dumpster was going to take it away to a new home. He spent the remainder of the evening telling anyone (daddy, grandma, grandpa, uncle "Kylie") who would even pretend they were listening and understood that the chair was in the dumpster, that he can't fix it, and he can't get in the dumpster with it. (That was the other desire that I immediately denied.)

This morning, the trucks came to pick up the dumpsters in our neighborhood. He seemed okay with it, and said "Bye!" to the chair, the dumpster, and the truck as he watched from his semi-permanent post at the living room window.