When Nikolas accidentally ran his new tractor into a chair leg yesterday, it broke into several pieces. After he'd brought me five different sized screwdrivers, it was clear that the tractor had carried its last load.But the tractor came with motorized back wheels like the old Evel Knievel motorcycle that I had as a kid. I thought it would be a shame to chuck the whole thing away. Inspired my Mister Maker, a show we'd recently seen in England and then here in Austria, I thought that maybe we could salvage some play value out a heap of plastic and metal.
So I had Nikolas fetch some tin foil, construction paper, scissors, glue stick and tape, and we started cutting and taping like crazy. He really had no idea into which I direction I was going. Soon he had all kinds of his own pieces taped together, and he was enjoying it.
Nikolas loves the movie Wall-E, a DVD his cousin Roosevelt gave him for Christmas. When I rolled the thing on the floor behind him, Nikolas turned to look to see what was making the same noise has his "old" tractor. He smiled but was a little puzzled. I'd also made an Eva using a capsule from Kinder Egg.
His said, "Papa, Wall-E is too tall and Eva is too little." Okay, fair enough. I didn't realize that he'd become such a discriminating consumer of toys. By today, though, he'd forgotten about the fact that they weren't made to scale. Or if he hadn't forgotten, he did a good job at hiding it because he seemed to be having fun creating his own Wall-E and Eva adventures!
