Turtle Power!

"Where are the scissors?" Shane asked.

"Where they should be," I said.

No, I didn't ask. 

Nor did I ask when I started hearing noise in the kitchen. It sounded like Shane was cutting cardboard....and I was okay with that. He was off electronics, around the corner, and making just enough noise to know he was alive and well.

Carrie came in the sliding glass door soon after.

"Do you know what your son is doing?"

"Being creative....I hope."

"You're going to want to see this," was the reply.

It worked out! Shane became a Teenage Mutant Cardboard Turtle (TMCT).

"I had the idea. Mom made it better!"

There was a dog/cat house of some sort, too, but that fell by the wayside.

"I can crawl now!"

Maybe we can add a towel and Shane can double as a vroomba.

Loki didn't know what to make of things, but he was going to bark. A lot.

"I can pull my arms in!"

Bark! Bark, bark, bark!

Hilarious! I wish another kid was around to enjoy it and they could have fought crime together. I know Shane hates it when I prohibit electronics for no reason, but this is the reason.

It was only a half hour of the day, but it deserved it's own post.

Epilogue: Max liked Shane's handiwork.

Creativity Flows

I like it when Shane gets creative.

There's normally only three hours of time on school nights between Shane getting home and him going to bed. Chores, dinner, and reading eat up at an hour to an hour and a half of that and then Shane normally enjoys another hour to an hour and a half of electronics.

That doesn't leave a ton of time for creative play.

On the weekends, however, there's more opportunity. I like to give Shane chores or let him be bored for a bit to see if he comes up with something.

After Shane made a neat train track, I asked if he wanted to build a Lego town around it.

He did a great job. It's dangerous to walk in there barefoot now!

Shane started to work on a comic book later in the day. It was about a poodle who was crossed with a man in a weird accident and sounded suspiciously derivative of Dogman, ha ha! 

Now, there's normally an open offer to play a board game. Shane normally doesn't choose to answer that call and I don't make him, because I want board games to be fun, not forced.

Shane actually chose to play a board game this past week! He asked for Monopoly at first (of course), but after I said, "Just about anything else," he chose Pandemic: Iberia.

We won by the skin of our teeth. We placed the last blue cube and then had to hope we didn't have to place another for a couple of turns before we cured the final disease. Shane was a sailor and enjoyed scooting around the board to his self-produced soundtrack.