In this memory, I am four years old. On Monday and Thursday mornings, while my mother is out on her work, my father, my little brother and I stay at home together. It usually begins with a lazy TV watching as my father gets up and takes breakfast over newspaper. Then we often move on to do some active playing.
Since my brother does not talk much yet, I am usually the one to propose what we do. One of my favourite activities is to play with wooden blocks. I bring out a box of wooden blocks and start building a castle. This is the thing that I always make whenever I play with wooden blocks. I love castles from my picture books, and each time, I try to make a new design.
As I build my castle using blocks of different shapes – cylinders for the pillars, rectangles and squares for the walls, triangles and semicircles for the roof – my little bother works on his own project. His project is also always the same: a bus, his object of obsession.
He picks up one rectangle and two circles, then places the rectangle on top of the two circles. That is it.
“Bus,” he says to us as he points to his creation.
Next to my 3D castle stands my brother’s 2D bus. I always wonder why he can be satisfied with this too simple an object. He is not interested in using other shapes at all?
My father suggests him to make something else, but my brother is so satisfied with his 2D bus that he does not bother. This is our wooden block routine.