Teaching your kid geek cred at young age is next to impossible, especially my attempts on my son at 16 months old.

First off, they have no attention span longer that whatever seems to be making the most noises or flashing lights.  So, when my son got his first set of blocks, I had assumed that because he was able to pick up lots of things quickly, I’d have my budding architect/starship builder learning in no time.

I was severely wrong.

As we first sat on the hardwood floor, the process of dumping the blocks out of the box, sending them clattering all over the ground was apparently hilarious.  This process was repeated some ten times, until I decided to move on.  As he sat in my lap, I explained the process of building a star base, then I started stacking up blocks while he watched. Trying to process exactly what was going on, we couldn’t get the barracks or communications tower to stand for more than thirty seconds before he decided that they needed to be dismantled.

Eventually, the neighing and bouncing song of him jumping on his toy horse provided sufficient time to build out a crude fortification, complete with Barracks, Communications, Space port, and Living Quarters.  I was able to get him to dismount and attempt helping in assembling the structures, thankfully, he was able to get at least a couple to set where he wanted.  Much clapping and smiling was his required reward for any such effort.  As we talked about troop deployments, and the importance of communications, we hit a snag, a foul, smelly snag, no, some bog monster didn’t come looking to wipe out our progress.  You can only take a guess as to what exactly transpired.  After half an hour of building, destroying, and building anew, we finally had a crude encampment with varying firemen, pilots and Hawaiian flight attendant ‘Little People’ properly placed, I rushed to get my cell phone for a picture.  Though, during my brief absence in the play-pen area, I came back just as the ruler of the lands inspected our building attempts more closely. I was then greeted with one word as he shot his hands into the air, and brought them forcefully down.

“Darn”

Then, the base was knocked over, blocks flying in all directions, much smiling and clapping ensued from a happy little budding commander.  Guess we’ll have to go back to playing with his toy tools, and teach him how to get started on building that warp drive.