Deconstruction

Wow, I have a couple huge "summer" posts to complete before the kids start school next week, we have had a wonderful wonderful summer and I want to record some more of it... but for now, just thought I'd pop in to say hi and share what we've been doing this week.

We were visiting a friend last week and for some reason she mentioned that when she taught preschool, they would get old appliances, phones, etc and let the kids take them apart and build things with the parts. I instantly knew (and I think she did too) that Saben would LOVE doing this. I mentioned it to him and it was practically all he talked about for 4 days.

Finally yesterday, I took him to goodwill to find something suitable. The only problem is that goodwill is expensive!! They were asking at least $6 for nearly every small appliance - toasters, phones, etc. And they were super junky, trashed cheap brand ones, not nice at all. (probably $9-$12 brand new) I grabbed one old hideous 80's style phone for him.

We managed to walk out with quite a few other things as well - a couple books, a puzzle for me, a lego checkers set and a double lightsaber toy. I also resisted supreme temptation to buy things just because I thought they were funny. For instance - a puzzle of Jacob from the Twilight series, a widely grinning ceramic monkey and several games featuring characters from cancelled teen tv shows.

Saben learned checkers last week, that was his other highlight of the week - he even managed to beat me first game although I wasn't terribly focused. I think he beat Kelley second game too, although that one was more of a tie. So we were excited to find the lego checkers set.

Anyways, I asked the guy at checkout if they checked to see if these $6 appliances worked or not - apparently they don't even check them, they just expect you to pay the money and then return them if they are broken. What a ripoff. Luckily when I told him we were buying it to just take apart, he dropped the price to $1. He also let us walk out with another $3 worth of stuff annika was holding that I forgot to make her put up on the counter. Awesome.

Saben loved taking the phone apart and now has a huge bag of junk pieces that he will do who knows what with...he didn't really like my idea of putting the phone back together, so we'll just wait and see I guess.