Is there any better way to bond with your son than building stuff? The answer is yes. Breaking stuff!
My wife recently bought a very large box of Popsicle sticks to do crafts with my daughter’s club. After the club was over, there were several hundred of them left. My son has recently begun showing an interest in construction, bridges, and skyscrapers. We thought it would be fun to build something together, and he decided that he wanted to build a skyscraper.
We had a great time doing it. The first night we just got out paper and pencil and he went crazy with his imagination. He started planning out secret entrances, barricaded walls, and helicopter pads. We had so much fun we didn’t even start building until the next night. We got an extra tube of craft glue from my wife (the stuff is unbelievably strong) and got started. We spent quite a while doing it, because you obviously need to wait for the foundation’s glue to dry before you can work on the first floor, and so on.
Unfortunately, he found that the reality of building didn’t match his blueprints, so we ended up making a much more simple building than he had planned. It was still a ton of fun. It ended up being pretty lopsided, but then one of his sisters knocked it flat after a couple of days.
For our next project, we decided that we needed to make something with the explicit purpose of destroying it ourselves. We rightly figured that whatever we built could not long be protected from both a 4 year old and 2 year old twins. (My hand carved chess set won’t see the light of day again until my kids are off to college.)
Our next construction project was a bridge. He designed it, we built it, and after the glue had dried we got out the encyclopedia set. We guessed how many volumes of the encyclopedia the bridge would hold before it collapsed. We each made our estimate and called the rest of the family in to watch. We stacked volume after volume on top until it passed both of our expectations. It finally broke and fell to the floor after we had stacked A-L onto the bridge.
Everyone gave him a big round of applause for his feet of 6 year old engineering, and we starting wondering what we could build and destroy next. I’m secretly hoping I can convince him to build two castles and two catapults so that we can have a Popsicle stick war.
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