October 27, 2001 - Saturday
This past summer we bought some wooden deck furniture. There was some minor assembly required with each of the chairs and the table and I originally thought it would be a fun diversion for Harry. It worked out, through partial back-orders, that I did this simple construction on three distinctly separate occasions and the first time was, indeed, a real hit. Harry took great pride in holding the screws until I needed them and seemed to take an interest in where I eventually put them. Unfortunately, the next to occasions where far less enjoyable. Harry still took pleasure in holding the screws, but disdained the idea of giving them up. I even tried to let him do some of the screwing using the included Allen Wrench, but on both occasions Harry's mood deteriorated to the point that his mother simply had to take him away.

Today, I started construction on a tool shed and figured it might be time to give Harry another try and Harry did much better. This time it was just going to be a lot of banging with a hammer and Harry is certainly good at banging these days. There's a film of me when I was almost five with two hands on a hammer helping my father build the cabin and I had visions of Harry doing the same thing. Unfortunately, there's a great difference between almost five and almost two and Harry, though he used both hands, seemed to have little understanding of the need to actually hammer nails and instead just wanted to bang on the wood. Fair enough, it was just the under-floor foundation and Harry was having fun


Comments, opinions?