[Crashing Cars] With My Son

Deke and I have spent countless hours "playing toys" as he likes to put it. When he was younger, the little guy was absolutely obsessed with making sure all of his trucks and cars and helicopters and airplanes and motorcycles and spaceships and bicycles and boats and hovercars and unicycles and hot air balloons and wheelchairs and rickshaws and -- you get the point. He has a lot of toys.

His first toy, my sentimental favourite (I'll take a picture of the real thing later).

To finish the above sentence, he was obsessed with lining up all of his vehicles single file or side-by-side in as symmetrical a fashion as he could. I didn't help matters when I taught him to sort them by color and vehicle type. It was an obsessive compulsive dream, and he did NOT like when somebody moved a toy even the slightest bit. We have since moved past that phase, and now we play out entire scenarios and stories involving multiple cars and trucks, different people, places, activities and the like. I think the best one was what he started doing shortly after he had his first Slurpee. He would have his imaginary man jump in the car and take a nice drive over to 7-Eleven to order one Slurpee. There would be a pause and he would ask if I wanted one too, and I always said yes, and he would order one for me as well. He paid the cashier, got in his car and drove on home to deliver the cold and slushy joy.

We also had the obligatory races around the room, cops chasing the bad guys and rocket ship launches. Sometimes, however, we throw all of that stuff out the window and stop messing around. This is the time for destruction. Most toy cars survive the perilous onslaught of mischievous might, but sometimes a plastic truck that is more susceptible to the hazards of head-on collisions winds up scattered throughout the room.

Understatement.

It's not just mindless thuggery, though. We destroyed a truck that I happened to really enjoy, but upon seeing its insides an idea hit me. Let's turn this into an educational experience! It was one of those cars that you can pull backwards to essentially wind up before letting go and watching it move on its own, so the little gears and gadgets that made that magic happen became a lesson in simple mechanics. We're working on setting up a day worth of mechanical experiments to explore as well, with this example being the starting point that refreshes his memory on the subject. Such is the wonder of homeschooling. Frivolous toy slaughter morphs into a science lesson in the blink of an eye. Or the snap of an axle. However you prefer to word it.

- Nicholas A. Marsico