Hours Of Fun

For those of you with children, or who are going to have children, or who think that some day you might want to rent some children let the above picture burn into your brain. This is Lucy, hard at work on one of her Christmas presents - a Smithsonian Mega Dig Lab.

The kit comes with everything a kid needs to occupy themselves for hours. Goggles, tools and two large chunks of a sandy type of plaster into which have been cast plastic dinosaur bones and "gemstones" of dubious value. My kid loves these things (she also had a sandcast pyramid out of which she extracted mummies and sarcophogi and all kinds of stuff), and I bet just about any kid would. Nominally educational, the set lets the child do what he or she is really good at - hit things with a hammer. It also includes a tiny brush that your child can use to brush away small bits and dust just like the pros do. Lucy can bring an amazing amount of focus to her brushwork - an amount of focus which could light a city for a year or clean three dozen eight-year-olds' bedrooms, not that such astounding focus would ever be used for anything so pedestrian. The kits are relatively inexpensive as well - a quick Google shows that Santa paid about $20 for this little box of fun that has currently occupied Lucy for 4 solid hours. She's not even close to finishing either.

I don't recall have anything nearly so cool when I was a kid. The closest thing I can remember is a Radio Shack electronics lab where I got to wire simple circuits to all kinds of junk. It was awesome for the first five minutes - after that it never worked.