I ordered hair clips. My kids got a craft kit.

Last Sunday I ordered hair clips from Machete. They came packed in biodegradable corn starch packing peanuts. My kids found the box before I could unpack it.

We were heading to a café at the ICA and they wanted to bring the box. Fine. I also packed markers and paper like a person who has their life together.

The paper stayed blank the entire time.

What happened instead: someone touched a marker tip to a packing peanut — just to draw on it, probably — and noticed it got a little sticky. Wet enough to bond. They pressed two together. They held. Then someone added a forked pink tongue. Then eyes. Then we had a snake. Then we had many snakes. Then we had creatures that were not snakes but had opinions about how many limbs they should have.

The whole box became a sculpture situation. We took it home.

Here's the thing I couldn't stop thinking about: this only works because of the corn starch. Regular packing peanuts — the petroleum foam kind — don't do this. They don't bond, they don't respond to a marker tip, they just sit there being bad for the planet and also kind of boring. The sustainable version turned out to be secretly magical. I didn't see that coming.

At Hold My Juice we spend a lot of time thinking about what's already in front of families — the routines, the patterns, the stuff that's just there — and how to make it actually useful instead of asking people to generate more. Same instinct, different medium.

But mostly I'm just thinking about how good the snakes were.