Monday, June 18, 2012

Ramps and cars


     If you ask, Little Bug will tell you that his favorite thing to play is "ramps and cars." As you might imagine, this involves using his blocks to make a ramp for his cars.  
    I have a clear idea of how this should be done. When he asks me to play with him, I always build the same one. It looks like the one below:

      Bug does not think much of this ramp. He'll usually let me run a car or two down it just to be nice, but he'll quickly begin to offer other suggestions. This is impressive given the limits of his words. He will, for example, stand up and step away and jump in the air to suggest it should have a jump. 
     He thinks my ramps are boring. 
     So I asked what he would build instead. This is what he made:

    I though this exhibited a poor understanding of ramps and engineering, so I asked what would happen if a car fell of the top of the tower. He drew curlicues in the air to demonstrate how the car would somersault, then smashed his hands together and said, "boom!" It would crash. That was the point.
   "Do drivers like to crash?" I asked, trying not to pre-worry the fact that he could get his license a mere 14 years from now. He sighed. Grown-ups are hard to explain things to.
  So then he built me this one:

    I admired how it went in multiple directions, had a jump, and a wall you could crash into. He relaxed a bit. Perhaps I could see the good parts of ramps and cars. He invited me to get down to his level and work with him by patting the floor beside him. I said I wanted to see what he built. He patted more insistently. I came and sat down.
  Little Bug had a plan. He started showing me how my ramp could be fixed. All these months I thought he didn't know how to build a gently sloping ramp that you could let go your car at the top of, but I was wrong. He started building my ramp. On steroids. With jumps.
     I made suggestions and showed him some tricks, which he sometimes accepted. We ran cars down it and problem-solved together why the cars didn't make it. I'd suggest a two-block jump. He said three (three fingers, carefully held up after counting off with the other hand). He persuaded me that he's actually right: three blocks lets a car complete a somersault, where it just crashes from a height of two. This is a carefully calibrated art.
     He talks like a comic book. "Bam! Pow!"when there were crashes. "Zippo!" is what he shouts when it makes it.
     We worked on it from before dinner until bedtime. I got more and more excited. Finally, this is what he built:
      I took pictures. We called Mama Jennifer. I showed her how a car would go all the way down, negotiate that top (3-block) jump, that final one-block jump, and shoot through the double arch. "Zippo!" I shouted, pumping my arms.
      There's a great, middle-ground ramp that he's learned to build, I thought, keeping his sense of adventure but creating something that works better.
      Still, I was a little wistful for his crazy architectural features, thinking sadly that I'd inculcated my little guy into the boring world of stereotypical but functional figures. I shouldn't have worried. This morning, he got up and built this ramp:
Zippo. Boom.