ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS for 4-year-olds

This past weekend we hosted a birthday party for my mother-in-law, who lives with us and who was turning 89. Family members gathered and a jolly time was had, cakes and ale and all. One of the partiers was a four-year-old great-grandchild, and to give his parents a break (they also had his months-old baby brother to tend to) I became the kid wrangler, which was my pleasure.

He found the basket of the building blocks I had when I was a child, and I encouraged him to build in a little nook at the base of my study stairs, out of the way of traffic. He began building a castle.

Most young kids have absolutely no problem with the idea of ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS. Indeed, they will splat paint or sing little ditties or stack blocks with no thought of making it perfect, and they will continue to splat or sing or stack just to see what happens or because splatting or singing or stacking is the goal, not perfection.

I played with him a while, giving him some tips on structural integrity — the bit on the right there up to the green arch is my contribution — and then left him to his own devices. (I just noticed the little red and green bridge inside my arch that he must have added.)

Every so often I’d check in to see how he was doing, and he continued to stack and add.

I pointed out to him the obvious Lichtenbergian aspects of his work, the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS and SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION — not using those terms, of course — and he continued his work.

Everyone knows that the main goal of playing with a basket full of blocks is to use all the blocks.

It’s a regular Gormenghast. I like the tilted block there on the left; it would never have occurred to me as a kid to do that. I’m also impressed with his ability to stack and balance, as evidenced by the towers topping the main structure.

The architect and his work (face blurred for privacy, of course):

So here’s to splatting and singing and stacking — if a four-year-old can do it, why can’t you?

(He also splats like a master.)