As I was climbing

the steps to bed the other night, I was enjoying the quiet of the house.  The girls go to bed at 8:00 pm, and the boys are supposed to be in their room by 8:30 pm reading quietly until 9:30 pm. 

That reading hour for the boys has not been a hard and fast rule, sometimes they read, sometimes they draw designs for a building project or make signs for a new business venture.  As long as they are quiet and engaged in useful activity, I generally leave them alone.

But on this particular night, I was pretty sure I heard . . . . . . . . . . . .sawing.  I listened more intently.  Yep, it sounded like someone was using a handsaw, and I didn’t have to wonder who.  I knew who.

I debated peeking into the boys’ room to see what was going on, but I was tired and wanted to spend time with Sid so I elected to discuss this with him.  I closed our bedroom door to further muffle the sawing.

“Is that sawing I hear coming from the boys’ room?”  I ask, hoping I was wrong.

Sid laughed, “Yeah, Sidney is sawing apart an old t.v.”

I sigh, dreading the sight of television parts that would be strewn across his bedroom tomorrow.  My creative, inventive son loves nothing better than to be given other people’s junk that he can take apart and rebuild into other things.  I am still learning to balance my intense need for order and no clutter with his need to experiment and explore, which often creates . . . . .well, disorder and clutter.  And it is true that my own creative spot often looks like a whirlwind swept through it.

The next morning I come downstairs to this . . . . . . .

“I thought maybe Fletcher wouldn’t be afraid of me in this since he can see my face,” Sidney said.

Fletcher, who is about 19 months old, visited our home with his parents last week.

“He was kind of afraid of me when I wore my robot costume, I think because he couldn’t see my face.  But when I took the costume off, he loved playing with the light switch.”

This is what poor little Fletcher had to face when he visited . . . . .

And no, those wires and light switch are not mere robot decoration. 

They light up Mr. Robot’s nose, of course.

The lightbulbs currently are just decoration, though out of curiosity, I asked Sidney, “Could make the bulbs come on if you wanted to?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, “but I would have to plug them into the wall.  I can’t do it off these batteries.”

I quietly nod my head, as if I understand his train of thought and wonder at how his interests and talents are so very different from my own.