Pirates! Robots! Ravens! Oh My!

I must say that having two boys with full blown imaginations in the house is very fun. Aaron has just started telling me stories. The other day, when he was learning about keeping on the sidewalks, he informed me that a raven flew onto the road. He had to call out, "No, raven! That dangerous! Get off the road!". Then the raven flew away and was safe. Apparently, Dave also drove him and Aaron through a big pile of mud and they got soaking wet. We're not sure when this happened.

Yesterday, there was some heavy duty construction going on outside at about 7am. Aaron insisted that he needed to go out (I let him in the fenced back yard by himself, and peek out the kitchen window). He kept running in to get little dump trucks, diggers and loaders. Apparently there's a lot of important work going on back there.

This is one of my favorite games -- the Fabric Pirates:



There are several stages to this game. In the first, the boys gather all the fabric they can find (usually one of my bins of yard or so cuts -- I let them at the fat quarters once and it took forever to clean up) and shove it in the bottom of their two story climbing thing. Then they set up their "gun"(an old vacuum pipe and an old hose spray nozzle) on the top deck and climb aboard.

In the second, they collect up their treasure into a bin (the one Andrew is sitting on) and put in on the top of the pirate ship with them. Then they usually argue about how long it is before the inevitable happens - a storm! When the storm hits, everything is knocked out of the pirate ship. This means the fabric bin is thrown out, hard enough that all the fabric scatters, landing at the bottom of the slide. Then the boys slide down the slide and "float" on the fabric treasure. Then they recover, gather up most of the treasure and get back on the ship. This used to be the end of the game.

But now, my favorite addition is stage three. This is the part where they are shipwrecked on a tiny raft, with only the treasure, a book, a trumpet (I know it looks like wheels ripped off of a push toy, but its very magical) and a spyglass (part of a toy microscope). They then entertain themselves on the raft until, well, they get bored and find shore. How do they entertain themselves? Well, Andrew and Aaron look at the book and talk about the pictures (Andrew gets to show off his superior four year old knowledge). They search for land or ships to rescue them. The rummage through the treasure. And my favorite of all, Andrew plays the magical trumpet, which makes Aaron do the magic dance. Classic, I tell you.

Andrew decided he needed to do some research on robots a while ago. The librarians love him, so when they realized he had already taken out all the interesting books on robots in our local library, they ordered some in from the city. Did you know there are robot soccer tournaments? Robots that can link together and follow each other's movements based on sonar signals? Robots that climb walls and wash windows? Insect robots that they are trying to program to reproduce? Crazy, the things people think of.

Anyway, this has led to a further spate of robot building. Here was a recent example of a robotic arm tool:


Do I really have to send them to school? Andrew is already starting to tell me that only Transformer robots are cool and that he only likes Buzz Lightyear and Spiderman, not any other guys. Sigh. I guess I'd better enjoy it while it lasts.