Folders

I just realized I have a folder on my browser called "backhoes."

As I mentioned before, he so loves machines and he is utterly crazy about them. He has books about machines that are dog-eared and held together by scotch tape and hope. Some are really beyond salvaging but I could not bear the thought of throwing them out because despite the ravaged state, he so enjoys looking through them still.

Then we realized that there is an endless supply of machine images available online! Backhoes, stump cutters, excavators, fire trucks -- all there at our beck and call!

Now every time he wants to see something, he just goes to the computer and asks us for the object.

And then we discovered YouTube. He actually asks for YouTube specifically now. Endless short videos on machines. There's a video out there called "Big Trucks in the Canadian West" and when we first started watching it, it was at something like 750 views. Now it's at over five million views and I swear we are responsible for half of that number. Our son tends to obsess.

Because his experience with technology is in this controlled environment, he's come up with some interesting requests. We were stopped at a light last winter and beside us was a dump truck filled with snow. "Look, Dex -- a dump truck," and his neck whipped so fast I swore he got himself whiplash. Of course, when the light changed, the truck moved on. This prompted our son to say "No, fast forward, fast forward."