Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Ryan wants to either be an inventor or a veterinarian when he grows up.  Right now, my money is on engineer because this kid is a problem solver and likes to try and figure out solutions. He has tested as "gifted" in "superior cognitive thinking" and, while I think most of those tests are very subjective, I'm totally buying this one.

Ryan's class is currently working on projects to demonstrate force and motion. To be honest, I'm pretty clueless about this project. I've read the handout that came home, but I can't really tell when this is due, if it has to be something made from scratch, or really anything else about it.  I'm trying not to let it bother me too much since it's the end of the school year, but it's still a bit frustrating.

Last week Ryan took his "coin coaster" to school for the project and I thought it was done. Simple enough. Last night he informed us that he had to take something in today and leave it at school until Friday when the projects would be presented. He wanted to take his marble maze, which we said was fine, but at bedtime he discovered an important piece was missing.

Of course it was at bedtime.

We let Ryan stay up an extra 20 minutes to look for the piece, but he couldn't find it. Duane even looked for it after Ryan went to sleep. No luck.

When Ryan got up this morning the search continued. As the time to leave approached, I told him that he'd just have to take the coin coaster to school again if he couldn't come up with something else, but the marble maze was not going happen. About thirty seconds passed before Ryan asked me if we had an empty milk jug.

"No," I said looking in the refrigerator. "But we have a juice jug I could empty out for you."

"That will work," he assured me.

I transferred the juice into a different container and as I was rinsing the jug I asked, "What are you going to do with this?"

Ryan squirmed, "Well....I don't think you're really going to like it."

"Now I really want to know what you're planning to do with it," I said.

"Well, since I can't find the missing piece to my marble maze, I figured I'd use this one (he held up a piece identical to the missing one - he needed two for the maze to work) as a model and just cut a new one out of plastic. Then I could attach the new one to the maze and it would work perfectly again."

As much as I hated to admit it ten minutes before we were supposed to leave for school, this sounded like pretty solid plan.  Except for one little thing.

"Ryan, how to do plan to cut the plastic? This jug is pretty thick"

Ryan patted me on the arm, then reached for the scissors. "Trust me, Mom. I know what I'm doing."

Turns out that I was right and the plastic was too thick to cut, but I was incredibly impressed with his ingenuity.  The kid saw a problem and, instead of throwing a fit like his mom or brother would do, he acted like his dad and found a plausible solution. I'm telling you, this kid is going places.