Last weekend we went to a wedding. It was fun seeing loads of friend for the first time in ages. Parenting does not lend itself to being social very often. So while most of the parents at R's school know that we're expecting, very few of our friends know.
That became more obvious pretty much every time anyone would see L that night. Almost every meeting went like:
Hi! How’s it going?looks down at L's belly for a momentit's been ages. What's new?
Which was fine. We didn't want to steal the celebration on their wedding day to make it about us and our news. So we were happy to let the topic slide. A few times, though, someone would say Okay, I have to ask... which would lead to OMGs and congratulations and suchlike – which makes for a good icebreaker between friends who've not been in touch lately. But, for the most part, it was just the long pause and carry on with conversation. That's the downside of not seeing people much.
In honour of Star Wars Day this year I'll be introducing another toy making project I've been working on for R that I've dubbed Rex's Moving Castle.
R absolutely loves the two-part Rebels episode The Lost Commanders and Relics of the Old Republic since she first saw it two years ago. She's watched that over and over again so many times. In this episode (context for those who've not seen it), the Rebels meet Rex and some other veterans of the Clone Wars who've retired to an out-of-the-way planet. These people live on an old AT-TE walker, heavily modified from a war machine into a home, in which they travel around the planet, stomping loudly and emitting smoke – highly reminiscent of the titular Howl's Moving Castle, a movie R also loves.
Modified AT-TE vs Howl's moving castle
L and I got an idea. I'd just finished up with building Howl's Moving Castle and the creative juices were running strong. So, unbeknownst to R, we bought a old AT-TE toy off eBay and started to modify it. I kept it covered under a tarp in the office (off limits to R) for several months while I planned and built it up – very slowly.
My home office desk
In terms of projects it was quite a bit of a challenge. I've gone through that episode frame by frame, eyeballing the layout and figuring out how to not only scale it down by 1:18 for the figures, but then modify it further to fit the actual size of the toy Walker (like most toy vehicles, it's not to scale). Fortunately the Star Wars web site has some good diagrams of it from which I was able to fill in the details not clear in the episodes.
Detail of concept art of the modified AT-TE from the Star Wars web site.
The process for building this is both fun and challenging.
Take pictures of the toy with a ruler for scale. The hardest part here is taking the picture far away enough to minimise parallax but still be able to focus clearly on the ruler.
Import into Illustrator, scaled to the correct size, then start drawing the 2d plans.
Print out the plans, page by page, and use them to cut cardboard mock ups. Cutting along the lines of a print-out is much easier than measuring and cutting by hand.
Tape the parts to the Walker to see how it fits. Often I'll try putting a figure or two on the part to see if it actually looks right and is properly playable.
Repeat many times until the size is right.
Do a final full colour print out. Glue it to the foam board and cut it with a sharp razor into that shape.
Hot glue that the the walker. Make sure to use a level so that figures can stand on the flat platforms without toppline.
Relax for a few days/weeks and get started on the next part.
I started with the easier parts. Building on to the Walker with platforms at the front and back. It took longer than I expected. We'd originally planned to give it to R by the end of the 2017, but it wasn't ready. So, instead, we surprised her with the work in progress with the promise of letting her help with putting it together.
In the months since then I've mainly essentially been learning about mini-DIY. I went through a dry period around the start of this year where I got nothing done. I'd finished the back room in Feb after working on it for 6 months. I sort of gave up thinking that everything left was going to be hard. Or at least notably harder.
A coworker introduced me to Fusion 360 – a bit of CAD software meant for hobbyists and the like. It wasn't too hard to export the Illustrator diagrams, extrude them and position the parts the way they'd look in reality. That was a breakthrough – being able to see what things look like before I even cut them out. It helped tremendously with the top back platform, since it showed me I'd got some sizes way off (the downside of mocking up in 2mm thick cardboard when the actual material would be 5mm). Now that the stuff I'm working on is particularly hard the CAD has been coming in useful.
Putting together with CAD software is slightly faster than cutting and gluing, and much less likely to cause cuts and burns
The latest phase I've done is having to drill into the toy to attach parts. It's a bit scary since if I make a mistake it'll be very hard to recover. Now that I've done it I do wish I'd done it for the front side walkways because it would have supported things much better than just hot glue.
I'm done with the drilling now, as far as I can see. I like to think I'm on the final stretch but I've still many complex things (like winches and pipes) to do and many little things (like lanterns and railings). Regardless I'm trying to not count the things left so I still retain my optimism for the project.
I've set up an Instagram page, My Many Creations for this, the spaceport and other things I've been doing.
I sometimes get irked at the sanitisation of fairies in modern children's stories. I suppose it's not the best behaviour, but I'm always a bit quick to point out to R that fairies in literature are not always safe friendly helpful creatures. A few weeks ago we had this conversation when planning a shopping trip…
… and then we can just take the bus to Ferry Lane.
Fairy lane?
No. Ferry as in a boat. Not Fairy as in those things that steal children.
They don’t steal children. They do magic. Like in the Rainbow Magic books and Midsummer Night's Dream.
They so stole a child in Midsummer Night's Dream
No they didn’t. They took care of him.
Um. Because they stole him.
No. They adopted him.
That’s just what they called it.
Ok. My first reaction after this conversation (beyond that I clearly didn't win) is how does R know Midsummer Night's Dream in this much detail? And since when is she able to have a meaningful conversation about Shakespeare?
Turns out she knows about Shakespeare, the Odyssey, Beowulf and lots of other classics from watching Magic Hands – a BBC show where they act out poems and parts of plays using cartoon animals and sign the dialogue in BSL. She'd not watched the show in a long time, but apparently whatever they did made the stories stick. Over a year later she could still have a reasonable conversation with an adult about a minor detail in Shakespearean play.
R is in year 2 now. Since year 1 she's been able to join school clubs. There are lots of clubs available. One of the clubs she chose for this year is Football Club.
Clubs at her school meet once per week. There are 3 Football Clubs. She does Wednesday lunchtime. Turns out that she is the only girl in that session. The fact that she's the only girl does not bother her at all. However, this week, she told us she wants to quit the club next term. The problem is that none of the boys in the club ever pass her the ball. She's taken to just sitting on the sidelines not participating.
Now I’m sure it’s not a case of 9 boys conspiring to keep the ball away from the one girl. I've met the kids in her year. Very few of them strike me as evil. I think it's just 7 year olds playing I've got the ball. I'll keep the ball. Add to that, the fact that all of them have payed football before, while R is new to it, and clearly won't be as skilled with the ball. What bothers me here is that whoever is running the club is not doing a good job of it. Ignoring the fact that they’ve completely flubbed teaching teamwork, they don’t seem to notice that their actions are causing the one girl in the class to lose interest. I don’t think the point of the club is to weed out the worst players. It should be to teach kids how to play the sport – especially kids like my daughter who clearly have an interest and have gone out of their way to join the club in order to learn.
L has spoken to the school before about this, asking for the person running the session to get the kids to pass the ball and play more fairly with each other. R says this never happened.
What am I expecting? First off, I’m paying for this club, I’m expecting them to provide a service for my child. It's not like I can come by at lunchtime at coax her into playing.
Secondly, it's about not institutionalising sexism in sports at such as young age. The school recently changed the football clubs from being a boys club and a girls club, to being mixed. They even took special care at signup time to point out that the football club is not a boys-only club, but anyone can join. So clearly they want to break down the gender barriers. However, what I’m seeing is that despite this, they’re letting it turn into a boys-only club by driving away any girl who wants to join.
On Sunday we decided to try an experiment. Could we leave the girl home alone in the house for a few minutes while we popped to the shop?
She's 6½ now, so being unsupervised for a short period is perfectly reasonable. Well, for a 20th century child. For a 21st century child... Well, that remains to be seen.
By the time I was her age, I'd been wandering the neighbourhood unsupervised for some time. Though that was the suburbs, so it's not entirely a fair comparison. I'd also been left with my brother in a car waiting for my mum to do quick shopping. And how different is that from going with L to the shops that are 200 meters from the house to pick up a few items for dinner?
We were a bit hesitant to try this out, Last year, L left R alone in the house while she gave a package to one of our neighbours. She'd agreed with R in advance that she was just going to be gone for 5 minutes. But, when she got back home, R was panicking, putting on her shoes and readying herself to go outside looking for L. She wouldn't talk about it for ages, but eventually she'd told me that she didn't realise L had left, so when she found out she was alone in the house, she wasn't ready for it. Hence the panic.
At least we knew what we needed to avoid this time. R was hesitant when we first brought it up, but then I pointed out all she'd need to do is Skype us from her iPad if she needed us. That turns out was the 21st century solution to the 21st century problem of being alone. She was now perfectly fine staying at home since we'd be at her electronic beck and call. I just needed to test that she was signed in and could make a call. After much cajoling, she finally made a test call to my phone and all was ready. Just some final goodbyes and we'd be on our way.
Ok. We're going to head out now. Skype is working. Just call or send us a message if you need anything.
Playing on iPadOk. Bye.
And if you get hungry, there's rice cakes on the counter.
If I get hungry, I'll just heat up some pasta.
Wait... No... No. You're not to use the oven or microwave by yourself, and definitely not when you've alone in the house.
Of course I won't turn on the oven by myself.
Remembering when she burnt a rice cake in the microwaveAnd the microwave. Don't use the microwave. You must not use the microwave.
but I know how to use the microwave.
Immaterial. You're missing the point. Just don't use the microwave when we're not in the room with you... Actually – Just. Don't. Use. The. Microwave.
You had to mention food, didn't you?
And so on.
We did get out of the house and make a quick trip to the shop. While in the check out queue, I decided to check up on her and sent her a message. No response, of course. Since Skype is now terrible at actually sending notifications, I figured it was nothing. But since my job is to worry, I just kept thinking of the worst possible situations. I send message after message, and kept thinking of more and more horrible mishaps. By the time we were on our way back, I was practically expecting smoke coming up from over the hill.
In the end, no, the house wasn't on fire. She just decided that she'd Skype her grandparents and was ignoring any messages that were showing up.
The experiment was a success. We did find a way to comfortably leave her unsupervised for short periods of time and managed to get dinner. I also learned that What could possibly happen? is just an expression, not an invitation to brainstorm.
At this point the spaceport was split in two parts – the landing platform, and the bookshelf part.
The landing had the roof for the Falcon to land on, and an internal hanger for Moya – R's Fischer Price little people airplane. The bookshelf part had 2 levels for fun play, a top floor, too tall for R to even reach, and a large bottom section which was no fun and just held random toys she didn't like to play with.
Needless to say, it bothered me that the space was not put to good use. I didn't really have a vision for how it could be used, but I did have plenty of spare parts left over from the Theed playset which were just adding to the clutter. So I decided to put them to use and make and half-floor in the lower level.
This was more difficult in a way since it required 1) actual construction that was more than apply hot glue to a to attach it to b and 2) a plan. The best I could do planwise was to use as many of the left over parts as I could.
In progress waiting for the glue to dry
The floor left over from the playset was awful. Which was why I'd not used it up until then. It was full of cut out lines where you could theoretically move figures around and make them do actions. I filled those in with hot glue and painted over the top so it didn't look too bad. You can see in the picture that they're visible, but I can live with it.
The floor is supposed to attach to two partial walls. I glued those in place, and glued shut the moving parts so it would be stable. Unfortunately there was the huge gap between them, which, without something in there, made the whole thing too wobbly. So I put some thick card stock between then, and covered half of it with a standard imperial wall decal, and fixed below that a lenticular postcard of the solar system R had lying around. It bothered me for quite a while that I was using a real space thing in Star Wars themed décor. But I told that part of my brain to shut up over and again until I could live with it.
Ready for play
I added on one of the random archways to the end to make it look more like a room, and connected the side of that to the other wall with pipes made from bendy straws. Hot glue does not stick to bendy straws very well at all. So these kept breaking off. I still need to replace a few of them.
With the platform ready, I had to attach it in place. I couldn't just glue it to the shelf above. It would fall off as soon as R played with it with any force. I had to support it somehow. I settled on some thick wire we had left over from handing things in R's room. Attaching that to the shelf above gave it stability and has held to this day.
Shortly after that, I finally finished decorating the stairs on the landing platform. The big problem I'd been facing was making them look thematically like the Bespin steps – the lights on the rise part with the circle - rectangle - circle pattern. I had the reflective tape to make it, but cutting a round shape was beyond my skills.
I bought a hole punch, which gave the ability to make repeatable perfectly sized round dots. I gave up on my attempts to make the shape between the dots rounded, but I think it came they came out pretty well regardless, as you can see in the photo.
When you have a child, summer is a special flavour of madness.
There are six weeks between the end of the school year and the start of the next, so it's kind of enforced family holiday time. Even if you don't take a holiday, most of your child's friends will disappear. The side effect of this is that not only do you have to figure where the child can physically be for those extra 6½ hours per weekday, but they need activities as well, or they go crazy. So the lack of the normal playmates just means the entire time is spent following one long map from event to event to event.
A lot of those events for us ended up eating out.
Between my parents visiting for R's birthday, R and L meeting me for my lunchhour at work. Meeting up with visiting friends, and our actual holiday, we found ourselves going to restaurants more often than we had for a some time.
Eating out with a child is risky.
A continual problem is that she doesn't understand that what she asked for when she orders is what she's stuck with for the rest of the meal. We try to mitigate things by ordering for ourselves things she might like. So if R doesn't like what she gets, L or I can share parts of what we get with her.
Best case, she ends up with something she likes and eats all of it.
Next best case, she eats until she's full, then L and I eat the remains. It helps in restaurants with small portions which don't fill up an adult.
The worst case, she refuses to eat anything. Not her meal. Not L's meal. Not my meal. And, of course, when we get home she asks I'm hungry. What's for dinner?
We had dinner. It was at the restaurant. That was it. We told you it was dinner and to eat at the time. It's bedtime now. You can eat in the morning.
It usually ends up with her delaying bedtime for uncomfortably long while eating some hastily prepared rice cake and something sandwich. It's not like we have loads of snacks and easy to prepare foods around the house. Because they are snacks and easy to prepare — they just disappear.
It doesn't end with just food choices. You never know when you make meal plans if the child is going to be in a mood or not. Or, if there are other kids, if one of them moods out, then that will just be contagious, and it's all grumps and I wants.
On the other hand, R does know how to handle herself in a restaurant, even if she forgets sometimes. R and I used to play café when she was around 2 and 3. We'd sit on the sofa and pretend to order food from a menu, talk to the waitstaff, eat, and so on. It was fun, and it means she knows how a meal in a restaurant is supposed to go, even if she often gets distracted and forgets. However, when she gets in the moment, she is on it. If she's thirsty she'll hail a waiter and order a sparkling water. If there's no waiter in sight, she'll just walk up to the bar and order. Often, at the end of the meal, when we start talking about getting the bill, she'll just get up and go up to a waiter and ask Can we get the bill please?
So while eating and interacting with us in a restaurant may be a challenge for her, dealing with the staff she seems to have mastered.
