The toddler loves his Duplo. Stickle bricks are just something to chuck out of their storage bucket so said bucket can be placed on head to facilitate Robot Dancing but Duplo is BLOCKSSSS!! He just about has the co-ordination and patience at approaching two and a half to get the bricks to connect but not enough to actually build things. He gets round this by scattering them randomly around the room, banging a couple together vaguely for a few minutes and then approaching one of us with an armful of bits and demanding we make a "Rocketpleeeeese" or maybe a "truckpleeeese" Occasionally we get asked for a helicopter, which frankly is impossible with Duplo supplied to make a couple of walls of a house with some flowers outside it. Rockets are easy peasy and we get round truck thanks to the wonderful Disney Cars Duplo my sister bought him for Christmas. Today, Small demanded a crane.
He is obsessed with cranes right now, they're even outranking diggers in terms of ultimate coolness. Despite the difficulty of the task ahead of us, Big and I decided the least we could do for our progeny was give it a good go.
I worked on the basic design, Big developed it and finally I refined the development until we had this -
Yes, we even added a string you could pull to lift things up and down. Oh and there's our duplo Mater, who is possibly responsible at least in part for the crane fetish.
It's a work of art, within the confines of the materials at hand, we ended up with something fairly accurate.
We had Built.
We were proud.
Small was happy.
Then we tried to play with it and it had all the stability and durability of a blancmange elephant transporter. Ooops.
But Small loved it and wouldn't be distracted from it so we had a long afternoon of 'Crane Mummy! Crane broken! Fix it Mummy! Fix it Daddy! Oh dear, Crane broken! Fix it pleeeeeeeese. Mummy broken the Crane, Daddy broken the Crane! Oh dear'
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