The Fort

Our Benjamin is awesome. He is so creative. He loves to build things, figure out how things work, and he finds creative uses for old things.

He also hates to throw anything away.  I am constantly finding little pieces of trash (ie: paper, wrappers, broken toys, sucker sticks, string, t.p. rolls, pieces of wood etc) stashed away in the corners of his room, under his pillow or bed. This part drives me crazy.  But I also love it....sort of.

In fact today we tore out 3 of our trees that had died this last summer and Benjamin had a melt down because we were throwing away our trees.  He couldn't let them go. He loves them so much. So even though one of the trees is obviously dead and has no more roots to it we let him plant it because he thinks it will come back alive. Yes, we now have a stick planted in our yard.  After he planted it, he watered it then sat there wearing goggles watching it "drink the water" and he promises me he saw it grow an inch already.

 sigh

Sundays are not a day of rest for his creative mind. Nope. Shortly after we get to church and sit down on "our" bench, Benjamin will gather the hymn books from the benches surrounding us and proceed to build a tower. He has perfected the art by trial and error.  The fact that we choose to sit on the 2nd row from the front in the middle section (for reasons we may discuss another time) only makes this escapade all that more....embarrassing.  Everyone and I mean everyone - including the bishop - can see what he is doing.  Okay so not everyone can see what he is doing but it sure feels that way.

What are we going to do with this awesome kid?

So while we have been building in the basement we have had a ton of scrap material left over and Benjamin has been in HEAVEN.  Scrap Heaven. His latest adventure in re-purposing things has been a fort. He came out last Saturday with his little tool belt, hammer and a box of nails and said he was going to build. I told Marc he better supervise this operation. So he and Marc - along with a couple other neighborhood boys - constructed a wall (of sorts - I promise our walls in our basement were constructed much more soundly) for their fort underneath our little back porch.

He is loving it. He is so proud of himself.  I am proud of him too....

But now he wants to go to the junk yard to get materials to build a pod racer like Anakin Skywalker. He even drew plans for it and made a list of materials.  Where are I gonna store that!?

Uff da....