I was lazy and tired today, and I didn’t feel like cooking, so we ordered pizza for dinner. Yeah, I know. Nobody cares what I had for dinner, but I’m gonna tell it anyway. (It was pretty good pizza though.)
This particular place – Helmut Pizza in Freising – delivers pretty decent and huge pizzas. My boy Rafa knows exactly what’s coming. In fact, he’s the first at the door when the door bell rings. I think he likes pizza too.
When the pizzas had arrived and I opened the boxes and placed them on the table, Rafa reached into the first box, and ran to his play corner, only to come back right away. What did he do? “Papa, little chairs!”, he exclaimed, and he placed a Duplo figure he grabbed from his corner to sit on it… These are among the best moments of being a father. It’s amazing how creative kids are, how free and unrestricted their thinking is. I see an ugly and unnecessary piece of plastic that prevents the box lid from sticking to the pizza. From his point of reference, it’s a little chair. I love this childish freedom. I wish I had more of it. But creativity and free thinking… they have been squeezed out of me during years of shitty education in schools. It’s really a shame we push all our kids through the standardized education systems, so they all turn into less creative and less free thinking spirits*. I’m not in the education phase yet – the kids are too young – but this an aspect of it I’m not looking forward to. I don’t want to lose the creative little dancer and singer that he is. I hope at least some of that survives.
I’m glad we could repurpose three useless plastic items, and give it a more useful life. Given that Rafa has plenty of figures in need of little chairs, this provides me with incentive to order another round soon-ish!
* I read a lot of work from Sir Ken Robinson on this topic in the past. He has a couple of excellent Ted talks and books on the matter! Look ’em up! I recommend them.
Robin Heinen 