Airplane Airplane Airplane

One weekend afternoon a few weeks ago, my wife said that our older two kids could have a little bit of screen time. It needed to be something educational and they couldn’t watch any type of shows. They need to read or learn something on their iPads and of course they were excited since they hadn’t had any screen time for a long time.

Our 5 year old son C wanted to make paper airplanes. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, so I sat down with them to make a few. I needed to go get some things done so he asked his Mommy to sit down and help him fold some more paper airplanes. My wife sits down and folds a bunch of airplanes with him and he has a great time.

After that day, he kept asking for the iPad so he could learn how to fold more planes. My wife was getting a bit annoyed because she felt like he was already getting addicted to screen time. What he was actually addicted to was making paper airplanes.

After L kept cranking out paper airplanes that he knew how to make, he started experimenting with new features and designing his own. He would fold them into all kinds of crazy shapes and color all sorts of different designs on them. All he would do is make paper airplanes every single day and he even got tons of kids at school to make paper airplanes as well. It was definitely a phenomenon at school.

Fast forward a few weeks and we still have tons of paper airplanes all around the house. Everywhere I look, I can see at least a handful of planes. C also digs in the recycle to get more scrap paper so he could make more paper airplanes. I think every survive a few more weeks of this, he would have made 1 million airplanes and be able to run a pseudo paper airline service. If this inspires him to be some type of engineer, the mess will definitely be worth it.