Dreamers love using their imagination

It's been a while since I've had an excuse to read a good children's book. After all, my babies are currently 13 and 17. They have long since stopped wanting me to read to them. It stinks because I rather enjoy it. So, when I had an opportunity to get a The Costume Trunk, a children's book, for free with the From Left to Write Online Book Club, I had to jump at it. (Plus, a picture book is almost all I can manage these days commitment wise...)

The beauty of reading children's books is that they do so much for the imagination. And for me, it reminded me of growing up in the Adirondacks and winters spent entertaining ourselves in the basement. My parents were genius at keeping us entertained. This was before the time of video games...or maybe we simply weren't interested in them. All I remember is the hours of fun we had with refrigerator boxes.

We would each get a refrigerator box. That was just the beginning of the fun. The refrigerator box was a canvas. We could draw on it with markers and crayons. We could cut it and modify it with scissors. We could turn that box into a boat. We could turn the box into a house. We could turn two boxes into a train. We could make a small village. We had a blast.

We spent lazy afternoons reading in our boxes. We would load them with blankets and pillows and just hunker down. I would load mine with books and run a library. We could throw a blanket over it and turn it into a table for a tea party.

I loved winters spent in those refrigerator boxes. Those are some happy memories. There's something about childhood imaginations that can turn the most boring things into something magical and wonderful...like a simple cardboard box. I wouldn't trade that time and those experiences for anything. In fact, I did my best to encourage those same experiences in my kids. So far, so good.