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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Buddy, inventor.

He collects. And then he creates. No pull tab from the milk carton, no toilet tube, no tissue box is spared in our house. The instant some household item is used, Buddy whisks it off to turn it into something else.

Like this robot, for example. Forget buying any fancy transformer-type toys or expensive legos. Buddy just makes thinks from our recycling. His favorite station in R1 last year was junk art. Parents were asked to donate any containers, cardboard boxes and cartons. We did. And we got our recycling back at least five-fold. Each day he'd return from school with a massive bag of his creations. This year was no different. His lovely teacher, Mrs. Legaspi, noted at our first parent conferences that Michael's favorite activity during choice time was to go over to the station with scraps of paper and tape and staples to make things - like books, houses, people, instruments, animals. You name it. We got it. Joey and I noticed the other day, just how elaborate Buddy's drawings are becoming. They reflect what he's thinking and learning. When they studied Hong Kong at school, he drew skyline upon skyline and named all the buildings. When they did construction, he drew blueprints of buildings and streets.

Then sometimes, he'll just get an idea in his head, and off he scurries to this set of craft drawers that E Em and Uncle Jared bought him at Christmas and filled with things like band-aids, tape, string, paperclips, craft sticks, etc. One day, he turned his top bunk into a cable car station and spent most of the afternoon playing with a ball-of-wool-car, sending it up and down the string stretched between the end of his bed and a spot next to his toys. This was a day last weekend when he came home from the beach and stated, I'm going to make a turtle costume! And there you go. Focused and energized - only asking for help when he needed an extra set of hands to hold while he taped - he created these. A turtle costume, complete with a small tail for himself, and a ladybird costume with antennas and wings for his sister. As I type, I can hear the sawing of scissors through paper, the ripping of tape from the dispenser and the enthusiastic scraping of crayons on construction paper. I went over and asked what he was inventing...a prison, I think.

At this rate of creation, you can imagine that our house is full of creative clutter. Rarely do we see the top of Buddy's dresser. And the art table is always stacked with some kind of box or tube. Buddy is getting really good at allowing me to do some clean sweeps. Once an invention has been around for several days, we know it's time to disassemble it and return it to our recycling.

You know, because it's good for our environment. And Mummy's stacks-of-clutter-induced grumpiness.

But, really. He's amazing. And, we do love to watch his imagination at work.

Posted by Norbyah Nolasco at 4:30 PM anna: said...

i loved reading this post! what an amazing little boy you have - creativity, initiative, the ability to entertain himself and the ability to see the potential magic that exists in the tab from the milk carton and toilet roll tube, all such amazing qualities! love, love, love it!! and how sweet that he also made a costume for ella...
anna x

June 16, 2009 at 5:29 PM 
i completely agree with anna.....=) he's got such a wonderful imagination...and....as the last picture suggests....he still loves to share....=) BTW...I love his attention to detail...i don't think I've seen a more purposeful turtle's tail!! very sweet...=) xn

June 17, 2009 at 6:33 AM