Just to be clear, our house is not deprived of certified kid-friendly building tools. Within various bins and boxes (and occasionally spread across the floor), Carmen and David have ready access to:

• Magna Tiles
• Kapla Blocks from a clearance sale at a grocery store, of all places, with enough blocks to make a railroad bridge
• Five drawers of traditional wooden blocks
• A couple variations of Erector sets and similar
• Several vintage sets of Capsela, with a few trips to Radio Shack to fill in any missing electronic connectors
• A few sets of Legos
• And, in case that isn’t enough, plenty of cardboard, glue, and string

However, in the last couple of months, David (with occasional help from Carmen) has decided that something is missing. With this meager set of building supplies, how, for example, can you make a one-room house big enough for you and your sister to eat dinner in? And with that goal in mind, they’ve discovered the tool cabinet in the garage.

This is the second or third cycle of building in the last couple of months. The garage is a nice multipurpose space – part vehicle storage, part bike workshop, but it occasionally gets taken over for a week or so by some life-sized building toys. A few days ago, this construction started – not sure who’s idea it was, but the carpenter in this picture has some serious braids going on.

And then a day later, Matt came home from work and found this sitting where his car usually goes. The car spent that night outside. This is supposed to be a playground, with a canopy over a climbing structure, a long piece that can be the beginnings of a slide, and a see-saw (not shown) built beside it.

One of the carpenters finishing his work:

It sat like this for a couple of days. Then today, I did what I figured any parent would do in this situation. I took the kids to the lumberyard, bought an extra box of nails and a dozen 1×4′s ($1.67 each, about the cheapest building toy you can buy), and let the carpenters finish their work. I provided some help in measuring the boards for the walls (a measuring tape seems more difficult a tool to grasp than a hammer or saw) and nailed the two boards on top. Every other piece of wood cut, nail hammered, or concept developed was done without outside intervention. Carmen jumped in a bit later, taking charge of some of the construction, the drywall, the security notice, and (in the last picture) cleaning and furnishing the house. The shovel and watering can are the “shed” in the back of the house.

A layer of onion skin viewed by the new-to-us American Optical One-Ten trinocular scope with a Celestron digital imager via Gnome’s Cheese software.

A few pictures from the Transition Houston Transportation Action Group Basic Bike Mechanics class at Performance Bike.  We started with a bike fit and repair overview and then moved on to discussing (and fixing) problems on our own bikes.  It was fun to have the bike shop to ourselves after hours.  After the workshop several of us enjoyed the 10% discount.  I bought a little something to help me clean up the chains on our family steeds.  Cleaning up the chain is my least favorite maintenance step, but it needs to be done—the chains get mighty gunky, hurting performance and wearing down those cute little teeth on the bikes’ gears.  It’s a hassle to repair stuff like that, so it’s better just to keep the chain clean to begin with. 

  he’s going to ask for a glass of milk. 

If you give us a clogged condensate line coming from our air conditioner last Sunday night just after we send C&D to bed, we’ll realize that we can’t really unplug it.  So, we use a hacksaw and cut it open.  We could just add a union and a cleanout and call the job done, but we decide that since we’re poking around in our 120*F attic, we can divert the primary condensate line to a rain barrel (condensate barrel, in this case) and send our secondary overflow to a spot over the kitchen window, where we can see it if there is a problem.

These are the lines coming out of our balcony ceiling.  We will have to patch a bit of the hole in our ceiling later—Matt didn’t have the right drill bit.  The open pipe is the one for the secondary line.  The PVC piping travels across the balcony

down to a corner a little bit out of the way, where we have an old Coca-Cola syrup container.

The container—a big plastic barrel–collects water that can be used to irrigate C&D’s fruit trees, over the balcony

and down, down

into the patio, where it ends in a little spigot even C&D can reach.

Since we were going to be tinkering, anyhow, Matt realized we could also take the water and get it flowing through some skinny irrigation tubing

which we could send down alongside the gutter

and around our foundation to a bird bath by the front door, where it wraps around the pedestal

and pops up to drip, drip, drip into the birdbath.  We will have to work to make this a more permanent setup, but it works for now.  We chose the location because we have a good view of the area from our upstairs.  C&D have a particularly good view from their favorite window.

I found the concrete bird bath in a trash pile near my house one day; I also found the square of granite in the same pile.  The granite is a weight for a patio umbrella.  It is also an attractive bird bath-leveler.  My neighbor didn’t mean to actually send these things to the landfill; she knew that if she put those things out on her curb somebody would come along and take what they wanted.  I put out things in front of my house, too, for the same reason.

Because we don’t know when to stop, the next day, when it was only 107*F instead of 109*F, Matt and I bought a bunch of Texas natives to add to our front yard to support our neighborhood birds and bees and butterflies and lizards.  We are watering like crazy this week.  But the animals are thirsty and hungry this year; it’s too hot and too dry.  Some of the plants we bought have medicinal, craft,  and food value for humans, too.  Come over sometime and I will show you.

Matt, Carmen, and David did most of the engineering for our condensate barrel project.  Now they want rain barrels to catch rain water, too.  David would like to design a rain collection and irrigation system like this:

In the picture you see the water falling off the roof and into a collection system of some sort.  There is piping to take the water to the front of the house, and to the back.  In the piping there are valves to control the flow.

(In the picture you also see someone’s math work.  C&D are learning to tell time, count money, work with fractions, do simple multiplication, and adding two- and three-digit numbers.  I think Carmen likes subtraction because she likes hoping that she will end up with a negative number.) 

Impressed by the physics of the water moving through the pipes and barrel, and tickled by the idea of irrigation, David has been experimenting with the remaining tubing using a bucket to serve as a kid-sized rain barrel.A piece of spare tubing is inserted into the bottom of the bucket.  The water flows down the stairs to a spotwhere David can experiment with the valves and connectors, and remaining pieces of PVC.  (I like how in these pictures I can see that David has taken his shoes off so they do not get wet, but he has forgotten to take off his socks.  We do a lot of laundry in this house.  Yes, we’re thinking about a greywater system from the washing machine next.  The machine is very efficient, but think of all those dirty socks!)<It is very hard and thoughtful work, all this planning, all this experimenting.  When we are working with the tubing we are too busy to even look at the camera.

We are all happy about our little project:  we have a system that is more complex, but at the same time we can more easily observe and maintain it; we are directing our A/C condensate to specifically beneficial locations (fruit trees, birdbath); we have done a favor for our our soil and plants as they will receive pure water from the air conditioner’s evaporator coils, not the chlorinated city water; our neighborhood bees and birds will have access to fresh water; when those flying friends come C&D will be able to observe nature from their favorite upstairs window; C&D are learning about the physics of water; and we learned a lot about collecting water, and caring for it as a resource.

Over the weekend while David continued to study the water moving through the tubing, Carmen got restless.  She decided to make brownies.  She read the directionsand added extra ingredients like nuts and coconut to prevent the brownies from being too rich.

We cooked our browies in muffin tins so we could eat some, and freeze the rest for later.  They are delicious. 

When David finally got tired of working outside, and Carmen got tired of baking, C&D starting making projects out of paper.  C&D have access to plenty of recycled paper, and have made everything from doll clothes to pretend fishing poles from it.  This weekend David made a steam engine, and glued it on a piece of paper so he could drag it along.He tried to put aquarium gravel in the center car—I think it is a coal car—but it collapsed a bit.  That’s okay—we can pretend.  Or perhaps make some out of paper.  We probably have enough to spare.      Earlier in the week Carmen made a scene out of an old Whole Foods bag and the very end of  a green mesh produce bag (the kind used for selling bags of limes or potatoes, for instance).  There is a bunny with green grass and a tree.  The bunny and tree are reinforced by the stiffer bag handles.

Sweet people, you’re such fun.

This Saturday, C&D will mark being 6 and a half years old. 

Last year, when C&D turned 5.5 years old, we threw a party at my mom’s house.  We invited the whole family: great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and the cousin’s children.  We rode ponies in the back yard, ate barbecue and cake, broke a piñata and opened a mountain of presents.

This year, the summer has been unusually dry and hot, too hot for a half-birthday party.  But we don’t need a party for presents.  A couple of weeks ago Carmen announced what she wanted for her half-birthday present—toe clips.  Toe clips are the plastic or metal enclosures that attach to the front of a bike pedal.   Carmen’s feet never slip off the pedals.  But Mommy has toe clips.  Daddy has toe clips.  Not one to miss out on something, Carmen decided she must have toe clips, too.

David doesn’t want toe clips.  He thinks the idea is crazy.  

And so apparently does every bike manufacturer in the United States, because nobody makes kid-sized toe clips. 

I found this out when I went to visit my favorite bike shop to pick up a pair of pedals for one of our bikes.  But they knew Carmen wouldn’t take no for an answer.  We’re all too hard-headed that way.  In case I wanted to try a little something experimental, they sent me home with a pair of toe clips.  Maybe I could figure something out?  I went home making a mental list of supplies for the next day: Dremel tool, duct tape, screws.

The next evening, we studied the cages and stared at Carmen’s pedals.  Matt figured the first and easiest thing to try was to just stick them on.  So he did.  And to our surprise, the cages actually kind of fit.  We were missing a strap for one of the cages, but Carmen got the idea, and loved them.  The next morning, we took a quick ride to our local bike shop to make friends and buy a couple of odds and ends, including that second strap. 

Carmen’s got toe clips on her bike.  You go, girl.

This summer, the rhythm of our weeks goes like this:  Dancing on Monday. Swim class and pool play on Tuesday, then meetings many Tuesday evenings.  Lunchtime book club at Rice on Wednesday, followed by friends and veggies at our house in the afternoon.  Swim class again on Thursday, then rushing to the allergist for my immunotherapy shots.  We end the work week with gymnastics on Fridays.

Like last year, we are a distribution point for the Wood Duck Farm CSA.  As soon as Joe drops off the shares, C&D like to pull our box down to see what’s inside.

It’s sort of like Christmas, every Wednesday.

Sometimes we get our favorite things, like corn and peaches and melons and berries.  We laugh in our good fortune, and feel grateful.