Dad Project 2 - Built to Scale

Watching Moss learn to use his body has been fascinating. He's increasingly confident in his abilities and, given the amount of time he spends practicing a thing before committing to it, I think it's deserved.

When we were in Montana at the beginning of the summer, he was constantly practicing crawling up and down the cabin's loft stairs. When we got back, he was climbing on all the things. He pioneered a path onto our bed by way of a shoe rack, learned the top of his play table is an excellent place to contemplate your navel, and started joining Cal on the couch. Even though he wasn't walking he was fearlessly scaling just about everything. Calla found him on the nightstand one day, and I decided to give him something it was okay to climb.

A digression -- when I was in 8th grade, I drew up the plan to the house I was going to build as an adult. It was basically a 2-story cubic hobbit hole and the killer feature was a climbing wall that joined the floors and wrapped around this sweet pillar into a sort of cave. I'd just done a week's worth of climbing at Camp Montvale so naturally I was pretty sure it was going to be a major part of my life moving forward. Then I more or less forgot about it for 20 years.

I started climbing again last year, and recently got to thinking about the old plans. We don't own and I'll probably never live in my future-cube, but I do have a nearly-toddler son who seems pretty intent on summiting everything in sight.

So I built him a climbing wall in the corner of his soon-to-be big boy room.

Her are my obligatory building photos.

The room was a disaster to begin with, since he's been sleeping in our room since, oh, birth.

Getting the angles right was math-y

Mapping...

Then drilling...

Then filing all the holes by hand

Priming...

And gluing...

And hammering...

And screwing...

And tightening... soo... many... nuts...

Designing and painting, protecting the nuts with dozens of golf tees

Framing was frustrating without quite the right tools, but doable

Moss was a big help, and by help I mean he was underfoot doing dangerous things

Progress was made, regardless

Finally installing all the holds

Finished!  Moss is understandably hesitant.

Apparently, he doesn't just need a little bit of persuasion...

Not really interested at this point.

At least he found a use for it: satisfying his need to put his fingers into random small holes.

It's been finished for about 3 weeks, and Moss is walking now, so the original rationale is kind of irrelevant, but he's finally started putting it together.

I don't know if this is something he's going to be interested in long-term. He's only 15 months old after all. But I don't think trying to lay the groundwork for common interests when he's a little older is going to hurt anything either.

One year apart. Holy crap.

July 27, 2013

July 27, 2014