I’ve been trying to get Corwin to cut down on the amount of electronic entertainment he indulges in. As part of that effort, today I attempted to introduce Corwin (and to some extent Charles) to one of the joys of my childhood. Mimi remembered it and sent up for Christmas a couple of bags of small wood planks (rectangular, about 1×3 cm and 2-3 mm thick). What I used to do as a child was get together with my brothers and build large cities out of small cedar squares. After each of us had built a city, we’d get some small catapults my father had built for us and fling the remaining blocks at the other brother’s city. The winner was the first person to knock down every standing block. It was great fun.
I decided that Corwin wasn’t quite ready for that (as I’m still waiting for my catapult to show up), so instead I built a small set of buildings, loaded up their rubber band guns and let them gun down the buildings. Both boys thought this was great fun. Corwin enjoyed it enough that he tried to build some buildings with me but his hands weren’t quite steady enough to build anything complex. It’s hard, because the require style of construction makes the walls act like dominos so a single mistake can wreck most of a building. It is precisely this, however, that makes shooting at them fun.
Of course, as soon as I stopped building, Corwin gave up and asked if he could play on the computer (with the tonal overlay of “now that I’ve sacrificed my valuable time to your vicarious childhood recreations”). Sadly, it wasn’t until hours later that Corwin got computer time again.