The underwear drawer system

My mother may have forgotten to teach me how to fry an egg over-easy (don't worry Mom, I figured it out on my own), but she taught me many other useful things:  good posture goes a long way, garlic breath is offensive, make your bed and you'll feel better,  a white shirt goes with everything, there are two sides to every coin, if you smile no one will notice the big zit on your forehead, etc., etc.

But perhaps the most useful bit of wisdom my mom imparted to me was the importance of filing away all important things...in your underwear drawer.

A receipt you need to hang on to?  Put it in your underwear drawer.  A trinket someone gifted you that is too ugly to put out in the house?  In the underwear drawer.  Expensive imported chocolate you want to eat without having to share it with the kids?  You guessed it.

And now I am passing the underwear drawer system on to the next generation.  Six people under one roof doesn't leave much private space for any of us.  The one space we each get to call our own is our underwear drawer.

What do I do when one of the kids insists on keeping a large, gray rock?  I point them in the direction of their underwear drawer.  What does a Rupp kid do when he finds a feather?  He can't leave it sitting around the house.  He knows if I find it I'll throw it away, and if one of his siblings finds it, he'll never see it again.  So he puts it in his underwear drawer.

Bright's underwear drawer is full of paper airplanes and cardboard rocket ships.  Zion's if full of snail shells and sketch books, and Brave's is full of dried chunks of who-knows-what (which he has found outside, and for which I keep a small box in the corner of his drawer).  Jubilee keeps notes and cards from her grandparents in her underwear drawer, of course.

But then there are those days when Daniel gets rabbit urine all over his legs and threatens to take the bunny out back and shoot it, and I find a mystery stain on my favorite white layering tank from Forever 21, and then I drop my phone in the neighborhood swimming pool and I think it would be nice...

it would be really, really nice...

if I could fit my whole self into my underwear drawer. 

This coloring page, had she wanted to keep it, would have ended up in her underwear drawer.