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Oct. 18, 2007
Most pencils in my house annoy me
We have a love/hate relationships with pencils at our house. We have too many of them, and even though we have a pencil caddy in our dining room, we always seem to have pencils on the floor and floating around the house. Then we're always having to take them away from the toddler, and use our Magic Eraser to clean our walls again.
I confess that I have pencils here at my computer desk from high school and college still. These are nice pencils, except their erasers are rock hard and no longer work. It seems a shame to throw away a perfectly good pencil when it's still over 4 inches long.
The children are constantly being given pretty decorated pencils, but their "leads" are always breaking off. It's difficult to keep them sharpened, and very frustrating at times. But at least their erasers work, right? Not if the toddler can get to them and bite them off first.
So then we buy those eraser tops to put on the pencils with hard erasers or bitten-off erasers. Either my children use super-strength to erase their mistakes, or they don't make the eraser caps like they used to, either. They have a tendency to rip up one side so they won't stay on the pencil when you're trying to erase.
The girls and I were discussing the problem with keeping the pencils sharp the other day, and I told them I just thought the decorated pencils don't work as well as the yellow #2 pencils. I'm sure this was during a spelling test as we struggled to find a sharp pencil, and then it broke, which started the search all over again.
Of course, the pencils breaking wouldn't be such a big problem if we could keep our electric pencil sharpeners running. My little angels seem to have the amazing power to break those, too. It's not just the toddlers trying to sharpen the eraser end or ink pens instead of pencils. We've also had pieces of "lead" get wedged inside so nothing else could be sharpened. I've become an expert at taking them apart and unjamming them.
Our current electric pencil sharpener has a duct taped "shavings drawer". But that was my fault. It resides on top of the microwave, and when I was trying to clean that area once, I knocked the pencil sharpener off and its little drawer that catches the shavings broke. So we duct taped it. It still works, you just have to be gentle when you remove the drawer to empty it. Except, now it's not sharpening. Maybe something's jammed in it ... again ...
We've had the most luck with buying older model electric sharpeners from ebay. The new one Steve bought at an office supply store last year didn't even last two weeks. Now, it wasn't a super duper mega heavy duty one, but it still should have lasted more than two weeks. We were going to return it, but we couldn't find the receipt, and it wasn't a high priority. At the moment, my kids are having to use these teeny tiny manual pocket pencil sharpeners. We need to get a nicer pocket pencil sharpener. The teeny tiny ones they currently have keep falling apart while you're trying to use them. Which just makes the process so much more interesting and calming, you know?
I don't know why we keep investing in more pencil cap erasers, and the rectangular erasers (which are a whole 'nother blog post), and more teeny tiny pencil sharpeners that just keep falling apart ... when we should just buy some new #2 Trusty yellow hexagonal pencils which do not have dried out or bitten off erasers and stay sharp longer without their tips breaking every few sentences. Public schools require those (for tests, at least) right? Well, this homeschool Mom is about to require them for her homeschool, too.
Actually, this homeschool Mom is about to go search ebay for another electric pencil sharpener. Her wonderful hubby was just treated to a verbal synopsis of this blog entry, and his response was "start shopping ebay for a new pencil sharpener and send me a summary of our choices". Somewhere in this house, or the shed, I think I have an old school room style manual sharpener. I think. If we find it in the move, I'm going to install it ... somewhere ... in our farmhouse. Then we'll have a backup for when the electric ones get killed by the kids, or dropped by Mom.
I hope your pencils and pencil sharpeners are being less troublesome at your home, and in your homeschool.
If you're scratching your head, wondering why I just typed a long blog entry about pencils, sharpeners, and erasers ... blame Tia at The Front Porch. She challenged us to blog about a pencil. So I did. I could have written a long blog post about how I adore my favorite pencil, but I don't have a favorite pencil. I could have written a poetic post about the feel and look of this red pencil with silver swirls and a green eraser cap that's sticking up out of my pencil mug, but I didn't. Instead, I poured out the frustrations that have built up over the past couple of months since we started school. Hopefully it was entertaining, at least. For me, it was a pleasant distraction from my list of things to pack and do before we move.
If you want to read what others had to say about their pencils (you might find some of those poetic ones) you can go to Tia's Front Porch Blog Challenge and follow the links to other entries.
Blessings,
April
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Oct. 18, 2007 - Great Post!
Stephanie@inspired