Building the Hand Cannon

Firstborn has no shortage of toys. Oh, he doesn't get everything he wants - but if he really wants something, he can usually get it. Despite this, he occasionally decides to make his own, apparently for the sheer love of creation. Mostly, I do my best to encourage this... though I will confess to a faint bit of exasperation on the day I came home to find my bed completely buried in paper airplanes.

Last night, though, he surprised me. He's built things with Trio blocks before (including, on one memorable occasion, a facehugger Xenomorph and a Halflife Head Crab). And he's built toy pistols out of Trio before, too. So I really shouldn't have been surprised that he'd come up with another one, and I wasn't - except that this one, unlike its predecessors, actually shoots.

It's a hand cannon.

What he's done, basically, is take the little cannon from one of the castle playsets, and mount it on a pistol grip. So he has to press a button out at the end of the barrel in order to fire, but it actually does launch the little cannonball on the end.

From the front...

From the side...

A few weeks back, in the wake of the Paper Airplane Incident, he asked for some paper and a stapler. Despite our considerable trepidation, the Beautiful Wife and I handed them over. Some time later, he returned the stapler, and showed me what he'd been doing:

He'd been making an axe. And a shield. Out of paper.

Axe-forward pose...

Shield-forward pose...

Okay, so it's not the strongest shield I've ever seen. I was still impressed.