Painted Planes

My children were making paper airplanes in volume this weekend.   They started with just the basic plane model with a piece of my daughter’s braille paper (which is great for the job).   Then the neighbor’s children were making planes.   This necessitated a way to tell each other’s planes apart, so they put initials on the back of the wings in big letters.

After that they got into striping and coloring the planes.   By today they were spending more time making the planes colorful and accurate, using straight edges, than they were in the actual flight testing of the planes.

We have an open ceiling from the first floor to the second floor with a bridge going across part-way to my children’s room.   It is from this location that the flight tests were conducted.   There are very, very few things that are allowed to go over the bridge.   This was something my husband and I put into place at a very early age and have never wavered.   Unless there is something we deem okay.   For instance a balloon is okay to drop over the bridge.  Dirty laundry is always okay because it’s easier on me to drop linens over instead of carrying a basket.

Paper planes were okay to be sent over the bridge, only protest yourself and don’t aim them at people.   The children were fine with this as they were looking to break records or do tricks or other goal and were cheering each other on.

I threw a lot of planes away this weekend that were no longer planes, instead they were crumpled balls—rejects I supposed.   At the end of the weekend I put together all the best ones, stacked them on top of each other and put them in the children’s catch-all cabinet.   They stacked so nicely because every single plane they had made had been the one, basic plane model.

As my son was getting undressed for a bath tonight I told him, “I have some books on how to make other paper plane models; would you like to try some out  next weekend?”  He looked pretty interested and said he definitely would.     Although next weekend is an awful long way away in the timeframe of a child; he might be into something completely different by then.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was confuses by how ‘Mrs.’ is pronounced in the book he was reading tonight.   He said there wasn’t even an ‘r’ in it when you said it and why would they spell it that way?    I explained it several ways and he finally just decided to pronounce it how I was saying and not worry about how it looked like it should be said.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was writing a letter to her braille teacher from last year.   I told her to write ‘Ms.’ and then Raffaella.  My daughter said, “no, I want the not contracted version of Ms.”.  I had to figure out what she was asking and then I realized there are a lot of shortcuts in “contracted” braille that she’s learning and she thought I was giving her a shortcut.   Eventually I just told her to spell ‘Miss’ because she was having none of my explanation.