Hands-on

"Close your eyes, daddy," my daughter exclaimed once I went home last evening. "Close your eyes."

I did so, and when I opened my eyes it was a new house. Vast terra incognita of wit. There had been a lot going on when I went to work. That's the first Monday of Jasmine's term break. My wife took a day off, and I didn't. My child simply created a dream house. You have to try to guess what it is made of. Cut and stick, draw and paste, think and pretend. The new house is all about firing up her imagination.

Shoe boxes, empty toilet paper rolls, handkerchief, and tonnes of creativity. They were good enough to make chairs, kitchen, fridge, potty, bathtub, bedroom and whatever-you-can-dream-of. Make a grid on the cardboard box, draw few circles and they are stoves, draw a square and it's an oven.

When my daughter was cleaning up the craft materials, she found a crumpled sticky tape balled into a small piece. Jasmine was shaking her head. "Sticky and yucky."

"Not really," my wife replied, "That sounds like a bulb."

Within a minute, the idea lighted up like a cartoon's bulb. Jasmine glued the "sticky and yucky" ball on the ceiling of her new house, and told everyone her house is now brightened. She flashed me a megawatt smile that could have powered the whole town for an hour.