I've grabbed a pen from the drawer several times now and instead of the click-click when I press the button at the top, I get a pleh. A saggy, unresponsive pen nib. I figured out why tonight when I stopped at the kitchen table to see what Ben was working on.
Ben's been driving me crazy with Mom, can I have two pop dots? on an almost daily basis. He keeps constructing a Ben 10 omnitrix over and over and over again. He has a basket full of them...
I had to lay them out just for posterity. Proof of how he is now with his repetitive creations (some are works in progress)...
He goes through my button jars to look for buttons, and he's very specific - they have to be big, green buttons. He places the pop dots under the buttons, because that's how the omnitrix works: Ben 10 presses a button to activate the omnitrix, the center pops up and he can spin the dial to any of the 10 aliens featured, then he smacks the center dial back down into the omnitrix and he is transformed into the alien. So, that's why we need a cushiony thing under the button. Like pop dots.
Or, a spring from a pen.
He figured out how to anchor the spring to the pop dots - one end of the spring pushed into the pop dot on the back of the button and the other end of the spring pushed into the pop dot on the omnitrix itself. Gives it some good height and makes it cushiony-er.
I go through rolls of tape (the empty tape roll also makes a good dial, so do water bottle caps), piles of paper, pieces and pieces of chipboard, so he can make umpteen omnitrixes. Before the omnitrix it was the Maurauder's Map from Harry Potter. Before that it was field journals from Diego and dozens of little paper Diego's. Before that it was Joe and Steve Blue's Clues's notebooks. He makes multitudes of whatever he's into at the moment.
I wonder what will be next?
:-)
