I am starting a new public accessible prototyping lab in Huntsville, Alabama, called MindGear Labs based on the fab lab model. I’ve dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur and have done a fair amount of research on the topic. But this is my first attempt at starting a business. Here is where I document weekly my mistakes and successes in creating a business from the ground up.

I’m staring at a Lego scene next to my chair. The centerpiece is the model of the White House. However there is a stormtrooper on the roof. And behind him is another Lego man. Off to the side is the stormtrooper’s speeder car, as is the other Lego guy’s smart car. The stormtrooper is pointing what appears to be the other Lego man’s garden sprayer at an Ewok treehouse. The Ewoks are innocently doing whatever Ewoks do whenever they’re not kicking the snot out of a bunch of stormtroopers. You gotta admire this stormtrooper’s bravery though, even if is he is firing from ambush.

This scene could only come from a nine-year old.-He actually did this several weeks ago. It amuses me greatly to look at it. My son took a couple of unrelated Lego kits and mixed them up into a surreal bouillabaisse. And of course the scene includes some sort of combat.

Why mention this now? Lately I’ve been meeting with marketing folks. That was this week’s theme as I rush around trying to start a business from scratch. And the marketers have told me to not forget the kids. Kids may not have most of the money in our economy, but pretty much all of what they have is disposable. And a kid doesn’t have to have money to wield considerable influence over how money is spent. That point is usually made to me with a recounting in sotto voce of how many times they drove their kid to dance class last week, or how far they traveled last weekend for their kid’s club team game. That’s not a hard point to make to me. I’ve spent my time coaching soccer teams, leading my son’s cub scout den and taking him to karate practices. I also seem to have become his practice bag for his punches and kicks.

Until now I saw my customer base being either engineers who want to build something cool after a long day driving a keyboard, or artists and others that want to sculpt something that expresses themselves. Clearly I need to give more thought to the kid side of things. I’ve always seen the educational aspect of the fab lab; heck, that’s how they were started. In fact in an earlier post I described the kids area my son and I sketched. But how do you entertain while educating someone who sticks stormtroopers on the White House? (Somewhere there’s a Department of Homeland Security analyst laughing over that last sentence.)

As a small business owner I moved quickly and decisively on this issue. I changed my son’s title to Junior Vice-President (Youth Relations). That may not be sufficient for this issue though. I need to give some more thought on how to be kid-friendly. That isn’t as easy to do as it sounds. Adults will still be the main users of MindGear and they might not want to trip over a bunch of little guys while using the laser cutter. And I’ll have to convince the kids that staring into the laser cutter isn’t as cool as it sounds. Making a lab interesting to a ten-year-old is considerably different problem than making one attractive to a sixteen-year-old, so that’s an issue.

On the other hand, giving the power to ‘make almost anything‘ to someone who ambushes Ewoks with a garden sprayer sounds very exciting! Imagine what surreal designs and contraptions a kid would make. My son thinks nothing of using my T-square as a crossbow or pretends a lamppost is a paintbrush or missile. What can he visualize in the gleam of a sheet of metal or the grain of a hardwood? The catchphrase for fab labs would really come alive in the fertile imagination of a child. Perhaps I’ll see them make almost anything. Although right now I need to build a Mindstorm robot to fight off the stormtrooper.

There is a mess in this house, long and winding — a trail of places left, those to go, and the hopes and tangents along the way. To leave it is lazy and layered in dust and frustration. To clean it is to deny that the sun ever thought to shine.

All things are out of order — lost crowns are newfound treasure, and open-faced books are the windows that we all fall into. Every out of place thing is but a bookmark where words did run across the paths of adventure. Every small muddy footprint is but a footnote to home and history. So many mountains. So many molehills.

Brooms are the batons of a warm and happy brass band. Their days are spent in sweeping parades and the spreading of springtime. They spend their nights in kitchen closets telling tales of clouds and flying to mops, buckets, and all who would listen. The quiet is filled with longings always longer and the constant wonder of which straw will be the last.

The day rolls slowly over shade and shadows, and the house tells time across cobblestones and wildflowers. The stars show up better late than never.

A rare spot of uncluttered floor lends itself to the wild dance of many things, and songs grown within the moment. Our little home is warmed by little boys and their hearts are full of rumpus.

There is a mess in this house, and it will linger through the morrow.

_____________________________________

In memory of Maurice Sendak, 1928 – 2012

Illustration from In Grandpa’s House

Image: Wikimedia

“And sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him
and it was still hot”

Maurice Sendak passed away Tuesday due to complications from a recent stroke. He was 83. Sendak wrote and illustrated dozens of children’s books, which earned plenty of recognition, and he won the prestigious Caldecott Medal, the Hans Christian Andersen medal for illustration and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal. In 1996, President Clinton awarded him a National Medal of the Arts for his work. His characters were often difficult and bossy, but always a pleasure to read about. He was best known for his book, Where the Wild Things Are.

In this classic story, Max gets in trouble for being rambunctious and decides to run away to a land where he can express his wild side. However, he soon grows tired of the chaos and decides he “wanted to be where someone loved him best of all,” so he returns home. For many, this book is a reminder of what our imaginations are capable of. Sendak’s ability to capture both the bittersweet difficulty of young children and the warmth and loving care of parents made Where the Wild Things Are a bedtime favorite for millions of children.

Rest in peace, Mr. Sendak.

LEGO was kind enough to send us their LEGO Master Builder Academy Level One set, created by actual Master Builders! Master Builders are the people that create all of those awesome LEGO displays you see in LEGO stores, Downtown Disney, LEGOLAND, and so forth and so on.

I could tell you all about the fun we had building the LEGO set, but this video does a better job:

If you have a budding Master Builder then check out the Master Builder Series. It’s good LEGO fun.

Thank you, LEGO!

LEGO sent us the Master Builder Academy set for purpose of this review. Obviously the opinions are our own.

The day has long grown thin, and patches of once blue sky have been pricked with golden pins to let the last of the faraway light shine in. They glow in countless wishes and the teetering twinkle of far-off diamonds rubbed dull from the sound of children whispering what it is that they shouldn’t tell. Who am I to say what might come true? I know nothing of dreams in the dark, but I can see the shade being found by fingers of the night, and tag, that is it. We are all going in, no matter how they cry.

Routine is based loosely upon the lacking of it.

A tender tooth is brushed soft with promise, its money well spent. Faces are washed, pajamas put on, and streams are crossed despite the warnings. Their beds are doorways and they want them left open. They will let sleep knock until it knocks them over. I will kiss them goodnight and once more when they don’t even know it and their room breathes light like a mason jar heavy with fireflies.

I fill the hours between their eyes closing and mine wide open with deadlines and other shapes more alive and slightly more forgiving. We all fight to stay awake and away, but my heart isn’t in it. It is in words and slow sips that linger on my tongue like the warmth of a day that seems days ago.

If there is a bottom to the bottle I don’t want to find it.

**********

Image from Pixar’s Oscar-nominated short La Luna and the wonderful imagination of Enrico Caserosa

Over the past couple of days my two sons have eaten more chocolate than they would normally consume in an entire year. It’s pretty much the first thing Noah asked for when he awoke from his afternoon nap, and like an idiot I gave him some. Look at his face. He’s barely conscious, yet he’s chomping down on a fragment of egg like there’s no tomorrow.

This continued blood sugar high culminated in an evening of belligerent children and stressed parents, the kind of evening which makes you turn your palms upwards, look at the ceiling, and think ‘Why did I have to have children capable of forming their own opinions and independent thought instead of kids that can be manipulated to do exactly what I want?’ In your mind, you form Fritzl-esque plans for a cellar where you can lock your kids up for twenty years, but eventually abandon them due to the excessive cost and risk of jail time.

Noah point blank refused to eat his tea, instead jabbing a podgy toddler finger at the fridge and demanding cake. Isaac had chosen one of our posh yoghurts to eat, taken two spoonfuls and refused to go any further, like a dog approaching the vet’s door, or a horse approaching a high hurdle, or another animal approaching something else.

My wife was on the front line, at the table, trying simultaneously to coax Noah to eat his food and Isaac to finish the yoghurt. Whilst she was in (figurative) hand-to-hand combat with our sons, I’d chosen to take more of a back seat, lobbing over words of reprimand and warning now and again like artillery shells.

Much like the French, our efforts at combat were useless, and so both children were sent straight to bed (where they now lie, yelling for me every two minutes). We brush their teeth and take them to the loo. As Isaac sits on the toilet, face scrunched in turd-straining effort, my wife asks him if he’s finished.

“I’ve only just started,” he replies. And I can’t help but wonder: is he still talking about the poo?

The eggs are in the icebox. They are cold and lacking color. The baskets are packed with rubbish and slowly overflowing. There are no candies, big or small, nor gifts of season’s folly. There are no heads in little beds and no bent to catch the morning. I have nothing to hide, and there is no one to hide it from.

If the boys were home the house would be loud and full of bustle, but they are not and only the sound of jazz makes its way up along the stairs. Only echoes bounce back down them.

I stood in the kitchen with coffee on my tongue and banana bread in my stomach. The paper would be in the drive and there was plenty of work to be done, but motivation and Sundays are not made to mix, so I let them dance their separate sways, two-steps and soft-shoes, breakfast with a show. I grew full on fruit and lonely, and wound up writing here.

The sunlight stirred a fly to buzzing. It has grown louder ever since.

On GeekDad, we often write about all kind of happy and geeky projects which parents and kids can build together. While we would love to believe that those projects are accessible to every kid in the world, it sadly is not true.

Too many children still grow up in armed conflict zones where their psychological well-being is severely affected. Luckily, non-governmental organizations such as War Child contribute to re-introduce a psychological, social and emotional balance for those children who lost it long ago.

Because a kid should always be, well,  just a kid, War Child decided to “Get the war out of children” by symbolically building a life-size Sherman Panzer tank out of 7,000 colorful balloons and released them above the city of Den Bosch, in The Netherlands.

We certainly hope that this amazing project, initiated by a collaboration with the agency Happiness Brussels and artist Hans Hemmert, will bring a smile to some young minds and awareness to the older ones.

Image source: wikipedia

Ever since he was able to look at a book, my son (6) has been fascinated by superheros, comic books and anything remotely sci fi. Whenever he was asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he didn’t say “football player, movie star, cowboy or astronaut,” he stated that he wanted to build a superhero suit that could make a person faster and stronger and help them fly.

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Recently though, he has a bit of a crisis of faith. He has reached the stage where he knows the difference between fact and fiction and knows that “superheroes” are not real and their exploits are only to be found in the pages of comics (and, yes, I have used the “but police and firefighters are superheros too” line… only to be met with a look that says, “yeah, I know that, dad, you are missing the point”). To say the little guy was upset was an understatement. It was as if his whole life plan had been ripped away from him. It was one of those moments, as a parent, that breaks your heart. I tried so hard to find the words that would offer him comfort, but for once I came up empty, and could only say “I’m sorry, buddy” and give him a hug.

My wife, on the other hand, had different plans.  She sat down in front of him and told him the following:

When great Grandma (who is 96) was little there were no airplanes, they didn’t exist. When she was little, if she got sick, there was no special medicine that would take her fever away and make her better in a few days, it didn’t exist. There were no cars that could drive 100 miles an hour, they didn’t exist. When bad guys shot at cops, they didn’t have body armor to protect them, it didn’t exist. What do all of those examples have in common? Well I’ll tell ya, all of those things were dreamed up by people who were once kids like you. So who’s to say that you can’t make a “super suit?” You might not get it right the 1st time or the 51st time or even the 101st time, BUT, if you surround yourself with other smart kids, who’s to say that on the 102nd time you get it right and boom, you’ve changed the world?

To watch his eyes light back up was one of those moments that melts your heart. He got his passion restored from some well timed words from his mom.

I’m pretty sure there is a point in all of this. Something about following dreams and reality and having a purpose? But the more I re-read this the more I’m left with the fact that parenting is hard, and that parenting a smart kid is REALLY hard and that I’m lucky to have back up. I wish you all good parenting, and that you have the kind of “back up” that you love and respect as much as I love and respect mine.