It’s Bigger than a Breadbox, but Smaller than an Elephant

The other day my Dad called and said while he’s cutting down some trees on his property he’s saving some smaller trees and cutting them into shortish lengths for my 5-year-old son to build something…like a cabin.   As you may imagine, my son was excited.  I mean…EXCITED.  

He’s been dreaming up a workshop of his very own for about a year.  A workshop that is not attached to the house and is his very own.  He draws plans for it, asks for stories about a little boy who is an engineer and has his own workshop for his bedtime story every single night and talks about it casually, like…”I’m going to put this picture in my workshop when it’s done.”.    With such confidence that it will, in fact, happen.   

So for my Dad to say he’s assembling logs for him, hooo boy…that was exciting.

My little fella has been begging to drive the 3 hours to my Dad’s house ever since and a while back we did.  He woke at the crack of dawn to excitedly jump in the car and go.  Now, as a Mom, I’m always trying to navigate the balance between dreaming big and somewhat real expectations.   (lest you gasp in horror, I’m only interested in knocking down the big dreams a tiny bit…)

So before we left I called my Dad to get some more clarity on what exactly we were talking about…I mean are these doll-sized logs, are they Little House on the Prairie cabin-sized logs for which I’ll need to rent a trailer and perhaps get a new car…what exactly do we have going on?  We have to manage our expectations AND dream big after all!  Such a feat. 

Turns out they’re biggish…too big to haul back and yet not so big that we’d need a building permit.  Just the right size for wonder but not big enough for pesky adults to be comfortable hanging about, once the construction is done.  AND this project, after further clarification, is intended to be a Grandpa and Grandson project, at Grandpa’s house. 

Perfect.  I need another project like I need a hole in the head.  (as I find myself this week drawing up plans and gathering materials for a camping kitchen box for next week’s camping trip…because I NEED one.  Indeed, I do.  What can I say, he comes by it honestly.) 

So we arrive at my Dad’s, much earlier than usual, to find the logs strewn about the woods (drying) with more to be cut and notched at a later date and set about picking less than 10 perfect spots for the “workshop” to be built.  No cabins will be built this day, and yet, bang, just like that, hours and hours worth of dreaming and planning and considering are unleashed in my little maker’s fertile mind. 

Oh, I know how he feels.  Sometimes the “planning” period is even more fun than the “making” period or the “all-done” period.   It’s simply thrilling to set about a project with time and space to dream it up. 

My friend, what are you dreaming of making with your own two hands?