Chairs...not just for sitting!

This was a nice, relaxing weekend. The weather was perfect and we had a lovely time at Nick's for Ani's birthday party. Auntie Anna went back to school so Niklaus will be sad and ask for her, I'm sure. Grandma Sue and Grandpa Harold stopped by with some kitchen chairs. One chair mismatched all of them and I put it on the porch. Three of the chairs matched eachother, but one had arms and the two others didn't. One of the matching chairs with no arms was broken beyond repair and Matty eyed it with much glee. Instead of making Grandpa load it back into the truck, I gave Matty the ok to destroy it and he ran looking for a hammer. For the next hour or so he mutilated the chair beyond recognition. It was a thing of beauty to see that boy swinging away. At one point I asked him if it would be easier to separate the legs from the brackets by using a screw driver and he looked at the hammer, looked at me, and sighed saying, "But Mama, the hammer works soooooo much better!". There were some spindles and bobbles that he worked particularly hard at not destroying, saying that he was going to "do something" with them later. When it was all over and he sat in the middle of a splintery mess, he begrudgingly but dutifully filled Niklaus' wagon full of the chair remains and brought them down to the fire pit and swept up what was left. Later on he brought his treasures over to me and said that he would like to make them into something. He thought they would make good back massagers! I told him that all the pokey splinters sticking out of the ends might make that a bit uncomfortable. When I went to bed tonight and after all the kids were settled, I looked at my night stand and saw that he had laid all the spindles there with all of the ends meticulously covered in duct tape! I can only assume he made them for me and Butch and I explained what they were to him. We both had quite a chuckle over our crazy destroyer/builder boy. We also cleaned the garage today and Matty got a special place for his "inventions", two drawers and the top of the little two-drawer dresser that Trina told us wouldn't be big enough for his awkwardly shaped, sometimes huge creations. I'm starting to think that we will need a wing of the house to keep up with that boy. His desk is littered with so much scrap and clutter from his inventions: little chunks of plastic, rocks, circuit boards, buttons, gears, rubber bands, old pieces of phones, bionicle pieces, etc. that there's no room for things like books and pencils and paper and all of the reasons I gave him the desk in the first place!!! If I ever try to throw away one of his thingies, he looks at me like I'm cracked and says, "MAMA! THAT'S my special invention!". Oh well, I guess it's a good thing he doesn't ask me to put them on the refrigerator!