Me: You finished (Lego hovercraft)!
Rockstar: <frowning critically> No Mum. It’s missing the (approximately 1 inch-long piece of plastic) gun. (It actually passes for exhaust apparatus but Rockstar thinks it looks like a gun). We need to find it <makes beeline for toy drawer>.
JD looking for a "present" among Rockstar's toys - she ultimately takes over all his ball toys with her persistence
(I’m thinking Oh No that’s just code for Let’s Excavate The Bowels Of Our Toy Chests And Sift Thru The Entrails On The Living Room Floor While The Dog Delightedly Roots About For Anything That Can Pass For A Hand-Me-Down Chew Toy, Because She Loves Bumming “Presents” For Herself By Capturing Treats Out Of Rockstar’s Bins Into Her Basket. Don’t think our dog doesn’t keep score of stuff Rockstar gets, Border Collies only look like a dogs. She once relieved Kings of his tv remote and got spanked – the Rockstar is a better sharer of his toys.)
Rockstar: I put it in here (goes to 2 bottom drawers I use for dumping all his matchbox cars/ wooden train track parts so he can rummage at will. Also very useful for scooping up clutter just before his father comes home and flips)
(I’m thinking How can he possibly remember he put that tiny piece of plastic in there, the Lego kit is hundreds of little bits, not to mention he knows I nag everyone in the house to put mysterious looking bits of plastic into the Ziploc bags I have available for just such a purpose because otherwise when we assemble things and are missing some of the bits Rockstar will refuse to proceed because of a missing item which then drives me nuts.)
Rockstar, JD, Lego
5 minutes pass…
“Oh! Lofty!” (His toy crane)
10 minutes…
“What’s in this egg?” (Those little plastic capsules holding tiny surprises that local friends told me are called “eggs” in Cantonese – Rockstar recently got hooked on them, they’re HKD 5-10 a try and there are often vending machines outside supermarkets and 7-11s, whereby you insert a coin and “twist for an egg…” I don’t throw all the little plastic “eggs” away, sometimes I put some other little thing in them almost as a reflex – because Rockstar always derives pleasure from finding something else in an “egg”, and it doesn’t always have to be a new egg…)
Another 15 minutes of playing with something or other from the matchbox car drawers…
“See? Told you I put it in here” Hmm? Told Me What? I’d already forgotten about the little Lego black plastic thingamajig he was looking for and I wasn’t the one playing with eggs and Lofty and various capalang.
“If you knew you put that little thing into that drawer instead of the bag with all your other Lego bits, then why didn’t you just put it in the bag with everything else?”
“Because I wanted to put it in here.”
Rockstar returns with the plastic bit, completes his Lego hovercraft, and then immediately takes it apart to build something else.
I was just thinking about the amazing capacity little kids have for remembering where they put the most obscure little bits of plastic – because those bits are important to them. If the Greek debt problem or CDO disclosure policies had been communicated as equally important, little kids might save the world. (Ok but seriously, just think – if we found a way to make them look at books or music the same way as they looked at their little bits of plastic, we would never have to push them…)
Wow, Rockstar is good at Lego building – one day when he grows up, he may just build a super machine in his bedroom or garage.
Haha thanks dear.. Don’t know bout the building, he just likes all these puzzle-things