Being the mother of all boys can present a girl with a number of challenges. One must condition herself to accept certain things like rough play as an every-day occurrence, sound effects as a way of communication, a bizarre yet impressive innate ability to understand electronics, and the constant building of ships and guns when encountered with tinker toys, legos or anything else that could just as easily have turned into something more tame... One must abandon her more gentle sensibilities and embrace all that is “the boy”…plus a degree in engineering would be mighty helpful! Today alone, I was called upon to design and construct several different forms of entertainment. These, I might add, must be assembled at a break-neck speed lest the requestor lose interest and you’re left running after him (them) demanding why there is now another mess-in-progress elsewhere when you have just spent 15 minutes trying to give them what they wanted. Don’t get me wrong, even though the play time enjoyed with most of these things is far less than the time I spend putting them together, boys love their mommies…give good thank-you hugs, lots of praise for well-constructed lego ships…and the smiles are priceless.

Logan was super way-impressed with my ships today. He said, “and you always say WE build good ships! Yours is great!” Ahh…go on! Obviously I spent a little more time building the one on the left. I thought I was done, but he then asked for “a bad guy ship”…so I threw the other one together.

He wanted to be the “background” for my picture.

Brady, the current lover of trains, always stands at the basement door saying “come on mamee…come on mamee!” complete with the come-here hand motion that means he wants to play GeoTrax. The problem is that he usually destroys them when he’s done so I have to build a new one every few days from the rubble. Here is today’s creation. I take pride in my GeoTrax configurations, putting guard rails at the ends of steep drops so the trains don’t fly off, choosing the right tracks for inclines (some don’t have treads and the trains get stuck), and testing traffic patterns in both directions

And finally, we also hit the trick-tracks bin this afternoon. We have a standard configuration, but you have to carefully search through the car bin and find just the right car for each job. View the video below and you’ll see what I mean. (the Bears car doesn’t quite make the cut through the loop section of the track…) While I was building this, Logan lost interest, found a remote in the office/playroom, tested it out, discovered it was for the computer, put on the media center and started Charlie and The Chocolate Factory through our on-line Netflix. It was all I could do to drag him back to the track he BEGGED me to build.