We have a problem in our house – a paper plane problem. There are paper planes in the living room, there are paper planes in the bedroom. I see them swishing through the kitchen during the day, I see them buried under my pillow at night. They fly like the blue angels in the backyard and float on borrowed water receptacles in the bathrooms. 

Two little hands stay very busy milling out these paper planes. They belong to my five-year-old. Like any great artist, my son is versatile in his art form. There are paper planes with wingtips folded up and paper planes with hollowed tail-ends. Some are big with gigantic flapping wings, and some are smaller than his palm. It is his activity of choice at any given time.

Now, there is a problem with all these paper planes – they are made out of paper. We have talked to my son about how paper comes from trees, and that if he uses up all the trees for paper, we like the dinosaurs, might perish one day. The ominous warning didn’t have its desired impact. So we devised a compromise. We asked him to only use paper that has something on one side. Things like printed paper printouts that we no longer need or his old drawings or preschool worksheets were ok. He agreed. 

One afternoon, my artist had another bout of inspiration. But there was no paper with ‘something’ on one side. Only plain white paper. He picked up a sheet and ran to me.

 “Mamma, can I use this,” he pleaded. 

“You know the rules,” I reminded him. We can’t use paper that has nothing on it.”

He thought for a minute and ran back to his table with the empty sheet. He picked up his pencil and began sketching vigorously. I was elated. Maybe he had at last found a new creative outlet- a more environment-friendly one. 

I walked closer to him to see what he might have conjured up on his sheet; a pokemon, a landscape perhaps, maybe even a portrait of a loving mother and son. I peered over his shoulder, but all I saw were a bunch of haphazard lines.

None the less I was ready with some positive words of encouragement when he approached me with his handiwork. 

“So, what do you have there?” I asked him. But he ignored my question and posed one of his own. Holding up the sheet of paper with the undecipherable scribblings, he asked, “Now that it has something on one side, can I make a paper plane with it?”