The mother of invention

As you may remember, Monkey likes machines. He likes dismantling machines to see how they work, and he likes inventing machines that accomplish marvellous things, mostly to do with his long-held ambition of flying. (Not aeroplanes, mind you. Much too pedestrian, if I may mix my adjectives. More along the lines of jet boots and rocket packs.) He's taken to telling us that he's about to make something "magnificent." He just needs a moustache to twirl.

I long for the day when his machines are made of intricate Lego Technix and do not involve a parent until they get to the admiration part: for now, they are either tedious verbal explanations that never end, or things that his father is required to construct out of cardboard.

 Jet pack, by Daddy, last November

So "When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to invent..." is a common refrain around here, and of course Mabel has picked up on it. She too will be inventing all sorts of things any day now.

Me: Mabel, when are you going to start using the potty?
Mabel: When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to invent a machine that goes to the toilet so I don't have to.
Me: [Deep sigh.]

Yesterday she told me she's going to invent a new bottom. Presumably one that doesn't need to pee.

At school last week, one of Monkey's friends was very scared by a thunderstorm overhead. Monkey related this to us in the car on the way to IKEA (it appears, by the way, if I may digress here for a moment, to be so long since I've been to IKEA that I totally forgot my usual route and ended up going a different way, finding the road blocked by flooding, having to go another different way, and vaguely wondering why it seemed to be taking much longer than usual; the clear lesson here is that I need to go more often) and my children proceded to have an argument over who would invent the better machine to comfort the boy in question.

Monkey: When I'm a grown-up I'm going to invent a machine that puts a force field around him to protect him from the thunder.
Mabel: No, I'm going to invent a machine with arms and legs to give him a hug.
M1: No, my machine.
M2: No, my machine.
etc.

I was touched by their concern, and managed to defuse the row by pointing out that they could put Mabel's machine inside the force field and thus use both at once. Co-operation.