On the wonder of flying things

Do you remember how, in this post, I might have mentioned that I think I need a flying car? My son had build one out of Lego and proceeded to spend a good 597 seconds explaining all the features and extolling the virtues of said flying car.

He was so in love with his flying car (which, I might mention, took far fewer Lego pieces to build than it took seconds to describe) that he went on and on telling me about it.

He was so in love with his flying car that by the time he finished telling me all about it, I was sort of in love with his flying car too.  A lot. Enough to want one of my very own.

Yes.

Well.

I think I’ve changed my mind.

Our young man recently turned 12 and for his birthday, his father bought him another flying thing. Not a bird, oh no! He bought him a quadcopter. You’ve seen them, I’m sure — remote controlled helicopters with 4 equal-sized rotors instead of one large and one small. They are odd looking in the extreme, some of them. They are expensive in the extreme, some of them. You can get Bluetooth enabled programmable quadcopters with video and still cameras capable of doing all sorts of stunts and capturing all sorts of images.

Like what your roof looks like. Or what your tree looks like when seen from overhead. Or what you look like, head tipped up towards the sky, remote controller in your hands, mouth smiling widely as the copter hovers overhead like a bizarre sort of bumblebee.

We didn’t buy that model.

No, we bought a much simpler (and cheaper!) version that does have a camera, but you have to take the micro-SD card out and download the photos to your computer. No live streaming over Bluetooth, no sirree. No live webcam of your amazing flying skills and spectacular scenery.

Which is probably a good thing.

The first time we took the quadcopter out of the box, we managed to get it to go a little bit up in the air before it crashed into the coffee table. Then the bookshelf. Then the television. It got stuck in the loops of the carpet. It got stuck under the ping pong table. It drifted lazily a few inches above the floor with one motor not activating as much as the other, giving it a very definitive sideways tilt. And then giving it a very definitive crash, with rotors popping off and everything.

Luckily, the rotors pop back on just as easily.

The next time we flew the quadcopter, we flew it outdoors. A little afraid of losing it, and with the battery already half used up from our previous flight, we didn’t get very far. Though we did take a lovely photograph of the blurry gray expanse of road in front of the house (right before coming in for a crash landing on that very same pavement right in front of our house).

The third time we flew, we had a little more success, finally mastering the fine art of gaining height and steering well enough to keep the quadcopter from crashing into landing on the roof. Though we apparently still suck at the landing thing and had to reinstall the rotors more than once after coming back to earth more forcefully than we intended.

The fourth time, K ventured out with a dear friend of ours who happily engaged in an hour’s play. He, being adult and male and rather engineering-minded (and having not spent his own money for the quadcopter), was willing to push things further than this cautious Mama was, just to see what was possible (and much to K’s delight).

Together they flew high and fast and far, zipping this way and that, taking photographs and hoping they turned out to be something more than a blur of pavement.

And then they landed the quadcopter in a tree.

They rescued it with a hockey stick and kept flying until the battery gave out, and K couldn’t be more delighted with his new hobby. He can’t stop talking about it. Or flying it. Or talking about flying it. Or talking about the photographs he took while he was flying it.

He is so in love with his quadcopter that after listening to him go on and on and on for about 587,692 seconds this time, I am sort of in love with it too. Though after listening to him tell me in great detail (and with much laughter) about all the times and all the places he has managed to crash his quadcopter…

…I think I can do without a flying car, thankyouverymuch.

At least until they figure out how to take the plunging-wildly-to-your-doom part of flying cars out of the equation.

Thunderstorms and plans gone awry

Today was supposed to be a day full of thunderstorms and rain and with two children fully rested now after a few days of no school, I spent last night planning and plotting as to how I could keep them suitably entertained and exercised while at the same time finding enough hours in the day to get my own work hours in.

Mother Nature, of course, declined to cooperate, and our day, while not at all what we planned, turned out to be marvelously wonderful.

The children slept in, as they have been lately, and I managed to log several hours of uninterrupted work before they started moving around. Then, while they lounged about in pyjamas playing on various electronic devices (a luxury resulting from Mama being hard at work and not entirely paying attention to anything other than the fact that they were quiet and hadn’t ventured out of their rooms), I kept working as long as I could.

I fully expected I would soon be interrupted, but I wasn’t.

Instead, I was distracted by a car pulling up across the street and some familiar-but-not-recently-heard voices. Our neighbours were finally, at long last, home!

They have been away for 3 years in Germany, you see, and we have missed them. The kids have grown enormously, though their adorable faces are still recognizably them in the way that kid faces tend to be, while at the same time being oh-so-different and more grown up and a curious mixture of welcoming and shy.

What else was a Mama to do but shriek with joy, bully the kids into real clothes, and rush outside to dispense hugs and hellos and more hugs in the midst of much happy chatter.

And, with the rain keeping its distance despite the almost suffocating humidity, the whole gang of us — two Mamas and six kids and a wagon full of sand toys and soccer balls and water bottles and snacks — headed up to the park for a good long romp (and a good chat) that somehow felt like we surely had done this just yesterday, even though it has been quite literally years since they were last home for more than a quick visit.

We kept looking at the sky, us Mamas, but the rains, though threatening in a sort of nonspecific hazy way, failed to arrive. The sun, while not shining brightly, exactly, was strong behind the oppressive overhead haze. We made tentative plans to go swimming in their pool after a quick bite of lunch and a few minutes of rest and off we went our separate ways… only to have the rains finally arrive at long last.

Out came my much delayed rainy day plans: A Lego challenge, and a movie-making adventure. I challenged them to build a car out of Lego, then use the movie app on the iPad to make a movie using their car.

They were excited at the prospect and immediately built a wonderful pair of vehicles. B’s is rather conventional, with four wheels, a driver behind a windshield, and a trunk complete with a suitcase full of money and a decapitated Lego minifigure head inside a motorcycle helmet.

Because every Lego car needs a decapitated head and a suitcase full of money in the trunk, don’t you think?

B laughed herself sick when I declared it so, insisting that she had not put a decapitated head in her trunk. It was just a helmet. Like an ordinary helmet. It just so happened that the minifig head was stuck and so the helmet came with a head of its own.

But not a decapitated head. Just an ordinary head.

And couldn’t I just pretend that the head just wasn’t there?

K’s Lego vehicle was somewhat less traditional a car. It didn’t have wheels, for one thing. Landing gear, yes, but no wheels. And it flies. Because who says cars won’t fly in the future, right?

I think I need a flying car.

And during the whole “Is that a decapitated head in your trunk?” conversation, he sat off to one side smothering his laughter behind a far too grown up look of amusement before finally taking his sister’s side and insisting that I must have misinterpreted the contents of her vehicle’s trunk.

I left them to their movie making then and got back to work myself while they made props and signs and gathered up Playmobil and other assorted pieces to assist with their movie.

They never did get to making the movie, though they’ve now got it all planned out — and it isn’t going to be a movie, I’ve been informed. It’s a movie trailer since those are shorter.

They might make the movie later.

Or not.

But they are definitely making the trailer.

As for the title of their movie about a car that flies and another car with a trunk that most definitely does not contain a decapitated head inside a motorcycle helmet?

Yup. You read that right.

The Beheader #1.

Coming soon to a theatre near me.

 

 

A little house

K likes to build things. Ever since he was  a toddler, he has been fascinated by how things are constructed. Big things, little things, complicated things, simple things… he loves them all.

Through the years, he has often been found building things. First, it was simple towers made out of blocks. Later, Duplo was the building tool of choice. He graduated to proper LEGO bricks very quickly, and that particular obsession still remains despite the introduction of wood and nails and power tools.

As he gets older, the things he constructs for himself have changed. Where once he was content to stack five blocks on top of each other and laugh hysterically after knocking it over, now he spends countless hours fiddling with miniscule pieces and connecting them to the LEGO NXT processor, followed by countless more hours hunched over the computer keyboard programming the software for his creations.

He loves LEGO, that boy of ours. In all its incarnations.
He builds other things, too. He builds with wood and nails and power tools, or sometimes just with paper and tape and glue. Lately, we’ve been building with Styrofoam and an old electrician’s helmet. Halloween is coming, you see, and we tend to build our own costumes around here.

Over the years, I have picked up the habit of “strewing” for the kids. It’s an idea I borrowed from the homeschoolers and unschoolers whereby you strew things around your house in a very intentional manner so as to entice your kids into a new avenue of learning.

A while back, maybe 5 years ago, I “strewed” the house with all things bird related. Little tiny bird nests and birds from the dollar store. Kits to build your own birdhouse. Kits to build your own bird feeder. Bird stickers. Bird storybooks. A bird identification game. And of course bird nature books to help us identify the birds in our backyard.

One of the joys of “strewing” things around your house is watching the kids find them over the span of a few days or a wees, and having them come running to you with eyes shining brightly, eager to read or learn or explore or try or do whatever it is that you left oh-so-casually lying around the house.

Of course the down side is that sometimes, the kids just aren’t interested. You have to be prepared for a phenomenal lack of interest. Sometimes, I’ll force the issue and simply announce that we are doing this together. Other times, I just tuck the item away for a rainy day when someone, somewhere announces “Mom, I’m bored!”

Eventually, being the bright kids they are, K and B figured out that this Mama now has a whole stash of things to do that were, once upon a time, strewn. And, being the grand old ages of 9 and 11, and allowed to use tools appropriately and safely on their very own workbench, they know just what to do with some of those kits of things to build that I’ve tucked away again after a few weeks of being ignored.

And sometimes, just sometimes, a young man of 11 who likes to build things sneaks downstairs and builds and paints and plots and schemes and leaves his mother a lovely little gift with a note attached that reads “It’s because I know how much you like birds.”

I do like birds. I like birds a lot.

And I absolutely love young men of 11 who build their Mamas little decorative bird houses painted in their favourite colour for no reason at all.