Tonight Widget got a new truck to play with. It wasn’t any special occasion, which is unusual, but it was the fourth day after Daddy left on a business trip, and the second day after Gramma and Grampa left after their short visit. Need I say it’s been a long couple of days?
We get along just fine when it’s just the two of us. It doesn’t happen often, and we’re really great pals, so it usually doesn’t cramp our style much. But Widget does get awfully fragile and the tantrums appear after a day or two. Not over anything major, mind you, just whether dinner is too hot (despite the strength of the East Wind AND the West Wind blowing on it to cool it off) or the tiny straw came out of his juice box. You know, normal two-year-old type things.
But I’m still fighting the pain of sciatica and maladjusted hips and have to spend a lot of time lying down. So after afternoon nap I went into the toy closet and pulled out the most amazing truck. It’s a MULA wooden truck that we got at IKEA a month or so ago and have been saving for just such an occasion.
This truck is awesome. Eight wheels makes playing with the cab or the wagon fun, and a string hitch keeps them close together to play with both. It has a built-in crane (which makes it a Lofty, for you Bob the Builder fans) and six wooden objects to lift in and out of the back. The neat part? There is a really strong magnet attached to the end of the crane and each object. When they’re turned to match up, they stick together with a strong attractive force. But if they aren’t turned the right way, they don’t stick.
So tonight we played with a new truck, did shape sorting, AND learned about magnets. Widget turned the first two all kinds of ways to study the polarization, and that was very cool. Then he tested each object to see if it would work like the first one, and that was very cool too. It was a productive evening, and he just went down for bed without a whimper.
We’ll play with it again tomorrow … with DADDY … cause he’ll be home tonight!
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[…] I was reading the latest entry over at Toddler Planet earlier, and it got me thinking about something else I should really be including on this blog. Whymommy’s stated purpose for her blog is to write about raising kids to be intellectually curious. That’s a goal of mine for Solly. It’s something I don’t talk about too much, in part because if I talk too much about my ideas for that I’m afraid I’ll sound like I’m pontificating instead of conversing; but mostly because it’s something so fundamental to how I parent (and how I interact with all children, not just my own) that unless someone else brings up the topic, while I think about it a lot, I seldom think to talk about it. […]
[…] A very good friend asked me about the wood truck that I posted about recently. She’s looking for some good toys made out of wood and other natural materials, and I was happy to tell her about it and some of our other favorite wood toys that we’ve bought or made for our 2 year old son, Widget. It was so much fun putting the list together that I thought I’d share it with you, my blogging friends, too! […]