A big patch of rain passed by and left behind 15 degrees lower temperatures. Suddenly, I found myself turning off the air conditioner, finding the long sleeved pajamas from my son, and having cold feet in the literal sense for the first time in many many months. Of course, with a rapid change in weather came our son’s first cold this season and the past week he has been coughing and staying home from kindergarten a few days. Loving his kindergarten and being a determined little man, he gave his parents a lot of resistance, but I promised we would find fun things to do at home as well.
When our son was just a baby, when we still were living in Tokyo, I bought a LEGO set that I have ever since been longing to build. I have kept it unopened, stored in a closet, waiting for my son to grew older so that we could built it together. I had almost forgotten all about it, but when my son was begging to go to his kindergarten instead of being at home recovering from his cold, this LEGO bonsai tree set suddenly appeared in my mind. Yeah, we can do that together now, I thought and my son was delighted at the prospect of building the little tree together.
My son was very aware that he was too little to do it by himself, repeatedly telling me that it said 18+ on the box instead of 4+ that is written on the boxes of his own LEGO sets to indicate the recommended age for the set. It turned out to be a very good incentive for teamwork, so rather than wanting to do it all by himself, he felt proud that he could help me build this bonsai tree with all of its little pieces and difficult instructions. He was specially fascinated by the leaves and took great care to assemble them properly. And the best thing, we agreed, was that in addition to green leaves there is the possibility to use pink flowers and frogs instead so we promised each other that when spring comes, we will once again come back to this LEGO set transforming it into a blossoming little bonsai tree.
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