By: Jerome Auza
It’s that time of the year again when kids are expecting to receive lots of toys and other gifts. My wife already had the usual Christmas day gifts all wrapped up, labeled and placed near the “belen”. I had promised to myself that I’ll not do any work the day before Christmas and spend as much time as I could with my kids.
My wife, an OB/GYNE, unfortunately was running the risk of not being able to get home on Christmas eve. Some of her patients at her maternity clinic were in labor. Her obligation as a doctor might prevent her from making the two hour trip back home from her clinic. Still, it was cool that she might be delivering babies on Christmas day. With baby Jesus born on Christmas day, what great honor to deliver babies on his birthday.
So what to do to entertain the kids? I was tempted to pass them the iPads but they’re still lagging behind their Kumon homework so they can’t their reward that easily. Then, I had an idea. Why don’t I show them what I used to do as a kid: make my own toys?
My three boys were still fast asleep late in the morning of December 24, 2015. I played trailer videos of the recent installment of the Star Wars saga with maximum volume and I had all three by my side in a few minutes. Then I asked them, “Do you want to make wood blocks so you can build stuff with them?” I got a very enthusiastic “yes” from all of them.
After the bathroom routine and breakfast, we headed out to a nearby hardware warehouse. As usual, we had a fill of the store’s free iced tea as we headed out to the far end to look for some wood. After making our selection, we bought three 8-foot long 1″ x 2″ pieces of smooth lumber. We also got some sandpaper and a small saw.
Back home, I showed them how to measure and mark the sections of the wood where I would cut. In a short while, their cousins joined in and before I could start cutting, they started jostling for position to get the first piece. I had to intervene a bit before someone starts crying.
Years of tapping keyboards does not make one a great carpenter. The demand was high (six kids in line) and supply was low (I was too slow in sawing the wood). One by one, the 6″ wood blocks were passed to the “owners”. I showed them how to smooth the edges out using sand paper.
My hands were aching using the tiny hack saw that was more of a toy saw rather than a real saw. Fortunately we had a real carpenter who was working on something at the house. He came to the rescue and finished cutting all the wood blocks in just a few minutes.
I didn’t realize it right away, but the kids had other plans for the wood blocks. I thought they’d just be putting them on top of each other and build crazy structures. They brought out their coloring pens and started drawing on the wood blocks. I could hear them talking about the Navy captain about to board the ship and the family members about to swim in the swimming pool that they will build. There were other stories and a few of them made me wonder where they got those ideas from. Some of the blocks were designated as the characters they talked about and they had drawn faces on them.
As more wood blocks become available, the ship was “built” and the swimming pool became “ready” for diving. It was satisfying to realize that the very simple wood blocks could stir up their imagination so much. For several hours that day, my little boys and their cousins imagined different structures, vehicles and many more with just some wood blocks and coloring pens. The wood blocks that were characters even started to “interact” with their other toys.
Reflecting on what happened that day, I realized that the best technology for play is the human brain. My kids have battery operated toys that become other characters when they run out of power. Their well played Plants vs. Zombies stuffed toys have become more than their original characters: one had “given” birth and another one “died” because it got old. Their imagination can run so wild and my wife and I would often laugh at their hilarious stories.
As an IT professional, one might expect that my kids are surrounded by high tech toys. While they do have some time to use their iPads and other gadgets, most of their play time is with real toys. I often tell them to play real games with their cousins. And just recently, I gave them wood blocks. I hope that real-time interaction with real things and real people will make them very capable to face the real world when they grow up. I also hope that when that time comes, we are still living in the real world and not in a virtual one.
More than just woodblocks after the kids used the coloring pens.
