Cardboard Dreams

The Highlights of this Weekend:

The Cardboard house my daughter and I have been tinkering with since…. Wednesday night?

Last month my STBXW and I both bought office chairs: she started at a new employer who is 100% remote right now, and in my little pea-brain think that I will forego having a couch in my future living space (instead I’m going to amass a collection of different chairs, HA). The boxes are pretty large and so Lilac and I came up with the idea of turning it into a house. She wanted doors in each of the boxes, but to me that seemed like a waste so I told her I’d cut one side open for a door then we’d leave the other one for something else maybe. Then we arrived at turning the boxes into a house. they’re 2-3 feet tall and together they’re about 5 feet long – that is, by separating one of the long sides to make a wall. One box is just a little wider than the other, but its negligible. It started as just that with a sleeping bag and a pillow. She’s opting to sleep in it over sleeping on the same bed as my post-marriage roommate.

In the days since, there seems to be a tweak every day. The first thing was getting the door to work better, so we spaced out the boxes. The next day, it was fixing the resulting gap with a cardboard patch (the other side is along the wall of the room, so no need to fix that side because…). After that, instead of using a flashlight on battery power we put in a night light. Then yesterday, I was upgraded from her twin sized firm spring mattress and onto the adulting queen-sized firm spring mattress with frame and box-spring. We will make another upgrade because the roof collapsed on her last night.

Poor Lilac doesn’t have a room of her own yet and there’s probably signs she’s ready… even though she hates to be alone and requires one of us to be with her when she goes to bed.

Does the pattern change when her Tent-Bed comes today? I’m not sure. I’m sort of preparing for that… but I think at this point she’s more comfortable around me. Another way to frame it, can money buy happiness for Lilac or will the bonding of piecing together things that weren’t designed to make a structure be more appreciated?