Color Me....

Some facts about me and crayons:
-I am very particular about my crayons.
-When I was a kid I used to dump out my brand new box of 64 crayons so I could sort them by color.
-I hated sharing my crayons because everyone always ruined them.
-When coloring I believe you ought to outline first, color second (always in the same direction)
-You should never break a crayon on purpose.
-I love a new box of crayons
-No other crayon is as good as a Crayola
-I love to color.  (Yes, I do realize that I’m 29 years old)

Okay, so I am helping with our school’s Veteran’s Day assembly.  I am making a couple of things with my elementary students to hang on the walls.  Some kids are coloring letters to spell out a variety of patriotic things.  Other kids are coloring things to make up pieces of the flag.  I had one class do the stars for me the other day.  I was two stars short so I just got to color.  Man, that makes for a great day at work, coloring in my office.

So I got my box of crayons out of my desk (yes, I’m a school counselor, I keep crayons in my desk) and got ready to get to work.  My first thought was, “Didn’t there used to be a navy crayon?”  I swear there was!  They started messing with the colors in the 64 box at some point though.  Mac and cheese…. that’s not a color.  Apparently with all this  crayon color creativity they got rid of the navy.  Ruined my coloring plans.

With no navy, I colored one of my stars plain blue.  The second star, the one I was really going to color navy ended up being cerulean.  Now let me tell you about my relationship with cerulean.  I never learned phonics.  I am a child of the 80s and thus a whole language reader. I don’t know how to sound things out.  I say really stupid things wrong sometimes.  It’s vaguely embarrassing.  Anyway, I did not know how to pronounce the color cerulean until… well, a few years ago when I heard it on Gilmore Girls.  I mean, I was like at least 24.  That’s really embarrassing.  Want to know how I was pronouncing it?  Sare-u-lene, not sa-ru-lean. Geez.  Not cool, Mary.  But, thanks April on Gilmore Girls for teaching me how to say it.

Okay, back to my crayon issues.  Last year I would sometimes take my box of crayons with me to teach guidance lessons.  That way I knew the kids had something to write with.  I did that most often in kindergarten.  We would always talk about my crayon rules:  no ripping the paper off without asking, don’t color the end flat, and DON’T BREAK MY CRAYONS IN HALF. The last time I brought my crayons some of the kids went on this crazy time of breaking my crayons.  I about came unglued.  It was all I could do not to shout at them.  Holy cow, it is so not cool to INTENTIONALLY break the counselor’s crayons in half.  They got a serious lecture about not destroying other people’s things and they never got to use my crayons again.  I may still be a little upset.  Some of the other kids peeled back the whole paper.  Not cool guys. And they are still in my crayon bucket, making me sad.