Catapults

Back over Spring Break, Boris and I were looking for a fun thing for the boys to work on.  We found a build your own catapult set at Walmart that looked like fun.  But then we were so busy that we never got it out.  Never even showed the boys.

Last week, when Boris was cleaning out some stuff he pulled it out of the cabinet and the boys started oooohhh-ing and aaahhh-ing over it.  We didn't let them open it right away because we were still busy. But this Thursday was the day.  Because we were finally home.

The boys ended up being pretty cranky, so yeah, the obvious solution would be to get out weapons for the boys to play with.  Two catapults with four missiles each = lots of potential for annoyance.

We got out all the pieces and had a lot of back and forth with dividing everything up.  At least there weren't that many pieces to put together.  I didn't realize it was going to need gluing so there was definitely some anxious feelings when the boys had to wait for everything to dry.

Over the course of the morning, they got to put all the pieces together, put stickers on, punch out enemies to knock down and start the battle.  Of course, battles are always fought best in your underwear.

First they were ok knocking down their own enemies.  Then Peter sat trying to convince Grady that they should try to knock down the opposite enemies.  Grady was very against that.

So, Peter sat perpendicularly to Grady "knocking down his own enemies".  Every time the missile would hit Grady's stuff (or Grady), Peter would turn to both of us and say "What?! I was aiming for my own guys."

After that happened a couple times, I asked Peter what different choice he could make so he would stop bothering Grady.  He had a couple different ideas such as 1) go slightly more than perpendicular so now he's just grazing Grady instead of outright hitting him, 2) try to aim farther so it'll go over Grady's guys instead of hitting them (or maybe he said he'd move his catapult back), 3) I think he even had the idea of waiting until Grady's guys were already knocked down before he shot.  I was amazed that the idea of "parallel" shooting didn't occur to him at all, especially since we were in a room with lots of open space.

They stopped playing with the catapults when Peter's friend came over to play.  But throughout the day, Grady kept losing his missiles (little bean bags) because he'd randomly carry them around with him and throw them.  Then he'd come over to me 10 minutes later and ask me to find them because he couldn't remember where he put them.

Needless to say, I'm not sure how long the boys will have the whole set of stuff for the catapults, but they did have a fun time building and playing with them.  I wish we had more time to be able to do stuff like that when the boys aren't too cranky.

And then we had my camera experiment of the day.  Meet Bond, James "Easter Frog" Bond:     Can't you hear the theme song in the background?!