twenty-five years in the making

Anyone else remember these books?

They were a staple of grade school libraries and Scholastic orders in the eighties. One of my friends had the whole set at home and while I was supremely jealous, I was also cognizant that whenever I tried to follow the origami instructions, I never quite ended up with anything more than a folded and crumbled piece of paper that, at best, vaguely resembled an asteroid or a hair ball.

Around that time, I came into the possession of a thick envelope full of origami paper. I know it was my aunt’s at one point, and I’m going to assume that she willingly gave it to me, but I can’t think of why she would due to my already-mentioned inability to fold paper in any way beautiful. I wonder if maybe I just took the envelope of origami paper. If so, I’m sorry Aunt S. I had somewhat sticky fingers as a kid.

Even with my origami inability well-established, I kept this envelope for years. It moved with me wherever I went. After living at home (Ottawa), I took it to university (Waterloo), grad school (Halifax), Hell (Calgary), failed attempt at being a worker bee (Ottawa again), and finally here (New Brunswick). I used some of the paper for crafts with Tesfa, but most of the time, the envelope sat on a bookshelf, upright like a book, forgotten about.

Until…

The Japanese exchange students went to Tesfa’s camp on Wednesday and showed the kids how to do some simple origami. Tesfa was enthused. She came home and told us she wanted to do more origami. Okay. Super. I can finally use the origami paper I’ve been moving around for twenty-five years!

But Tesfa was adamant on one point: she wants to do origami from a book, not from instructions on the computer. So on Thursday, she and Geoff set out to the library to find origami books and came home with the one you see above. My nemesis come back to haunt me.

But…. tada:

Please ignore the blurriness of the picture. Tesfa insisted I take it while she was sitting on a stability ball.

I MADE SOMETHING FROM ONE OF THOSE ORIGAMI BOOKS! The book tells me it’s a water bird rather than any specific water bird, so feel free to decide it is a duck or a swan or a loon or I’m out of water birds, so I don’t know.

So take that books that foiled me when I was nine. I’m smarter than you now!