Papery

If you've been anywhere near Sebastian for the last six months, you know he's been saving up his money to buy a digital camera. I got my first digital camera from my parents when I graduated from college. Several years later some of the functions on it broke, whereupon we gave the camera to Abe to use. Several years after that, it stopped working altogether, and Abe gave it to Seb to play with and take apart. Which Seb did---repeatedly. After taking it apart and putting it back together and disassembling the lens and unraveling the electrical wire millions of times, Seb decided he also wanted his own WORKING camera. We impressed upon him repeatedly that he should NOT take his new one apart, once he got it, and he insisted that he wouldn't. (We'll see!) He found a used camera on Amazon for $20, so he's been working and working to save up for it.

It was a long wait for him, and while he waited, he was constantly pretending to take pictures with his old camera, and making dozens of model cameras out of paper. Every day there would be a bunch of new ones lying around (each iteration slightly modified, as Seb added a telescopic lens here or a battery compartment there).

And now he finally got his actual camera! He loves it and keeps it with him constantly. I am going to miss those paper cameras, though!

More paper construction: Seb made this paper "California Screamin'" roller coaster model after we got back from Disneyland. It is meticulously constructed to mirror the curves and loops of the actual roller coaster (he looked up pictures and satellite views until he got it right). Seb gave this to Abe for his birthday.

And, Seb has spent HOURS and hours making these paper speakers. He read somewhere that you could make a working speaker out of a paper plate, so he's been trying to do that for months. I was amazed at how persistent he was—adjusting the length and gauge of his coils of wire (he was raiding everything in the house for wire: flashlights, his radio, his CRT!), trying out different shapes and strengths of magnets, experimenting with paper shape and thickness. I would have given up on it after the first few tries, but he must have made twenty of them, until finally, he got one to work! Then he was even more obsessed trying to make adjustments so it would be louder and work better. This speaker pictured above is one of his best attempts. It played the music loud enough for us to hear it several feet away. He was so proud of it! And rightly so.