Ben With His Cart and Cans

Ben made a go-cart with his dad.  They scavenged the wheels from a broken stroller and a rusty wire shopping cart and used boards and odds and ends in the basement.  Ben was patient, but persistent  with his daddy's busy schedule until the go-cart was done.

Ben rides it almost every day with great joy and pride.  He's gotten several comments from the oldsters on the park benches who remember "building carts" when they were boys and thought youngsters didn't do that anymore.

Then Ben wanted to make himself stilts and raided my coffee-can stash in the basement.  There are metal cans down there, but he chose the plastic ones and was enamored with the way the drill melted the plastic when he made holes.  And Genevieve got into the can stash, too, to make a pulley system of cans from the balcony to pass messages back and forth.
 

None of these things were suggested or explained by me or my husband - I love how timeless children's play can be!

And then, to cap off his summer, Ben won a watermelon-eating contest at our block party.  His prize was a whole watermelon (ignore the tootsie-pops) which suited our family fine: a kid bringing home legitimate food!