Recently Erin instituted mandatory play at the house to curb screen time which has resulted in bringing the slide and basketball hoop from the basement to the living room for Elia and Curie to play, there is piano playing, drawing, painting, pig pile on Mommy, elephant and horsey rides and all manners of roughhousing that you might imagine for an almost four and a one-and-a-half year old.
But there is a little bit of time when Elia and Erin go up for a bath that becomes Daddy and Curie engineering time where Curie’s imagination gets to run wild and Albert helps her make her ideas a reality (Elia is still in the knocking-down-is-more-fun-than-the-frustration-of-not-being-able-to-build-yet phase – though she has started playing trains without tearing up the track). To be fair, Erin has long built houses with Curie ever since she was a toddler. The reason for this post though is that in recent months Curie has become much more dextrous in her ability to build and create.
We have three train sets, a Duplo one, a wooden Thomas/Chuggington/IKEA/Brio set, and a VTech track from Shawn and Chris and Cy and Librada. Erin’s father and Curie had a great time building tracks, but here is a recent Chen Engineering Company production:
If you haven’t played with Kapla, they are precisely cut blocks of all the same shape that you build in to amazing things. They used to be very expensive, but recently Ikea started making their own. Curie wanted to build a house for her Playmobil, Octonaut, and Frozen figures to live. One thing led to another and here we are:
There are Lego sets that are amazing recreations of things from the VW Camper van to the Star Destroyer to architectural sets, essentially models made of Lego. But Lego and Duplo were really about creativity back in the day. We have a Duplo set that Suephy and Ed handed down to us that Curie and Elia play with. The other night Curie wanted to build a restaurant so here is a table with nine chairs, a stair case to the oven (where we were cooking Sven and Pabbi – don’t ask), and Joy and Sadness as Giants were looking on. If you look carefully Sir Topham Hat and some strawberry girl were eating with two Playmobil people. The trees were from a previous project:
