x-wing

We have come to the next chapter in our Star Wars themed household – building a space ship. As it happened, we got a delivery in a big big cardboard box, so big that we felt that it would have been a great shame and waste not to play with it before folding it up and bringing it to the recycling station. What to build – an X-wing of course. We had a little model X-wing ship that we used as reference, we took out the big scissors, tape, paper, found some other packaging heading to the recycling station and started to build.

Before long our whole living room was a construction site and it took my son and me three afternoons to finish the project. I cut the thick cardboard parts, my son cut the paper, used the tape and drew details on the ship. He also made a head for R2-D2, the droid riding in the back of the ship and put it in an old suitcase. The special thing with an X-wing (hence its name) is that the wings that are normally folded flat, are unfolded into an X when the ship is entering attack mode. We wanted to replicate that and thought using some string and a few parts from the box of BRIO construction toys my son has been playing with since he was 2 would make the trick. And it worked! Sitting in the cockpit my son could fold and unfold the wings using the string, and the BRIO-parts also helped when constructing the steering wheel.

Knowing how my son generally dislikes to through away things he has made, we had a talk about how long we should keep his X-wing in the house. One week was too short said my son, I thought two weeks was too long, so we settled on 10 days. But after having played with the X-wing indoors and the time came to pack up the space ship and go back to using our living room for living instead of flying again, my son was still reluctant to recycle his ship. What about we bring it outside and take some cool photos, I said. And so we did. We managed to transport the whole ship outside, reattached the wings that had fallen off during the move, I dug up my protective glasses I use when trimming the grass and my son got his bicycle helmet.

To our delight, Princess Leia also wanted to join, and the three of us had a photo shoot and made some fun space mission movies together before retiring the ship with a lot of happy memories of this adventure in a galaxy far far away.