My son came into my room and was eying the pens and pencils in my pencil wrap. My Dixon Ticonderoga pencil was just sitting on top. He asked if he could have it to draw with. Mind you, he had one of his 120 colored pencils in his hand at the time but he insisted that he needed my pencil. I told him that he could and he grabbed it and went to his table to color. I heard Angela telling him something but I didn’t know what. He looked a little confused when he came to tell me that the pencil was broken. I thought that he had pressed down too hard on the tip and broke the lead. When I looked at it, the lead was not broken but it did look like he had been using it to color as one side of the lead was blunt. It seems that after coloring with it for a while, he kept pushing the eraser but no new lead would come out. Angela had been trying to explain to him that it was similar to his colored pencils that needed to be sharpened after use. He was adamant about the fact that the pencil was broken. I quickly understood what the problem was and, since I wanted my pencil back anyway, I told him he could have the other, bigger pencil that I had in my wrap instead. He agreed to the trade and went off to keep coloring.

Here’s what he’s thinking. In my post about the Goodie bags, I took pics of the Zebra mechanical pencils that I put in every bag. Well, my son liked them a lot and took some while I was packing them in the bags. He quickly figured out how they worked and kept clicking them, pushing out the lead, and causing it to break. Those needed to be taken away after a while because we can’t have my 9-month-old daughter eating pieces of lead while she crawls around. When he saw the Dixon on my desk, he confused it for one of the mechanical pencils. The pic below can further illustrate why he might have made that mistake. Remember, he just turned 3 and the color of the pencil itself doesn’t matter because he mostly uses colored pencils.

The Zebras were made to look similar to small wood pencils (the yellow and black look even more like wood pencils) and the pencils he has used on a regular basis are these. He didn’t use his first wood pencil too much after he bit the eraser off and was using it like a bat. But that was 4 or 5 months ago. SO much has happened since then.

Two things learned:

1. My son’s on the bullet train to pen, pencil and stationery addiction and I’m just fueling the fire.
2. I need to order more Dixon pencils.