THE UNIQUENESS OF YOUR OFFSPRING:

I'm not talking about the next Einstein here, just the wonderful things our childlren sometimes do of their own invention.

When my son August was a preteen he took valuable(?) lessons away with him after attending Sunday School. They only have an hour, and were doing art that day when he discovered the fan and the plastic bag idea. I guess the teacher had rigged up a place where they could put their wet paintings set up inside a big plastic bag with a fan blowing directly in on the wet paint to dry fast so they'd be able to leave with their paintings when their parents picked them up.

I had tried that black plastic, used to keep down the weeds between rows, back when I'd tried gardening about that time, and he asked me if he could "have" the rest of the black plastic. Sure, I said, thinking there was very little left. He was always doing some project with his friend Eric and Johnny. This time it was a humdinger. With the use of duct tape and the black plastic, they had found that they could make a rather large "bag", and when they taped it to the blower side of a standard floor fan, after rolling the bag up, by turning on the fan full blast, the bag would unroll and fill up ...no matter how big the "bag" was.

His father and I were watching television in the living room, and he set up this bag thing so it would fill up in our direction. It was so funny. We had no idea. He set it going, and the big black blob started growing, and growing until it practically swallowed us on the other side of the room. August had a great time with that, even leaving the fan on at night downstairs in the rec room where he would have sleepovers inside his big black blob of a room. To my memory, this is the most unique thing any of my children have done.

We had a dog that would ring the doorbell in order to be let back in the house, and my husband Al, would stick the dog outside when company came to show them that trick. So, of course, Al had to pull the "Hey August, get the fan out and show our guests your big black balloon room." Then he would watch the expressions on the company's faces while the blob kept expanding and expanding like some horror film blob that was going to eat them, and grow bigger and bigger until it claimed the world.

If you have a remembrance of something unique you did as a child, or your child or grandchild did, I wish you'd leave a comment... or go to my Facebook page with it. But comments on blogs are welcome.