Cake and Copters

Yesterday, while his younger brother took a nap (an unusual moment of calm in our apartment), Ian assembled a Lego helicopter with his Papa. But this wasn't any old Lego helicopter: it had tiny rubber antennae that could attach to a single node of any brick, doors that folded up and down, and complicated joint pieces that allowed other pieces to move. I didn't pay much attention. After all, this was clearly a toy designed for father-son time. After about 30 minutes, actually, it seemed a toy designed solely for father time as Papa became engrossed in perfecting the helicopter's assembly. But Ian was observing his father carefully all that time, so on the way to school today, I got an earful about helicopter design.

"So, Ian, tell me about the helicopter you built with Papa."

"It's cool, Mom."

Of course. I had no doubt. "So how does it work?"

"It has these flat parts that go around and keep it up. What are they called, Mom?"

"Propellers?" I ask.

"No, Mom, these other things, these flat things?" he asks, with both palms up and a perplexed and insistent expression on his face. You must know this, Mom.

"I don't know, Ian. That's my best guess. Does your helicopter have a man inside?" I asked.

"It has two mans. It has one who drives and one who jumps."

"Oh, a jumper. That is cool. Where does he jump?"

"He jumps down in the water but he's inside this little thing and so the shark can't get him."

A shark? This was sounding more and more like that climactic scene in Jaws when the helicopter coming to rescue Chief Brody and the kids is gobbled up - rotors, pilot and all - by the giant fish.

"What thing is he inside of? Is it a pod?"

"Yea, it's a pod, yea." He clearly had no idea what a pod was, but was glad to have the new word in his vocabulary, as it figured prominently in the rest of his narrative.

"Yea, he's in a pod and so he stays there and the shark can't get him. The pod has windows, so he can see the shark, but it can't get him. (Just in case I missed that point.) And the man driving the helicopter goes up and up and doesn't fall down." Yes, I knew, that was thanks to the unnamed propeller-like things that were not propellers.

"Ian, if you had one in real life, would you have a helicopter that was big and slow (I'm imagining Platoon-like transport choppers) or small and fast (I'm thinking Miami Vice, with that 80s percussion playing as it skims low over the azure water of south Florida)?"

"I'd have one that is big and fast!" he says, triumphantly, skipping towards the crosswalk.

Of course he would. Wouldn't we all? Next lesson: why you can't have your copter and eat it, too.