A lesson in patience

A friend of mine was recently trying to talk me into volunteering some
of my time to help handicapped children. I declined his request, not
for any of the reasons that might first spring to mind, but because
any time I want to help a child who struggles I just go and spend a
bit of time with my 9 year old son. He is autistic. Not severely, but
sufficiently to make life with him a challenge at times. He gets ideas
into his head and it is virtually impossible to get them out. A couple
of weeks ago he talked my wife into buying him a child's pizza oven
thing at a second hand store - eight bucks, no big deal, right?

As soon as he had it home he announced that he needed to build a shelf
for it to sit on - suddenly Dad is involved and this turns into a
woodworking project. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) this fell
when I was extremely busy and only had little bits of time to spend
with him, so I was trying to delay until the weekend. He is a very
determined child and decided that he could manage the project on his
own. The first I knew about it was when he showed up with a handful of
3" deck screws and asked if he could borrow a screwdriver to put them
in with. He has a toolkit but the phillips screwdriver is too small
and he knew it wouldn't work. I asked him what he was going to build
and he said he was building his shelf for the pizza oven. OK, so far,
so good. The power tools are under lock and key, so I know he's not
going to get into real trouble. I asked where he got the wood and he
said from the scrap pile out back - excellent! He has even learned
what he can use without asking, and that has take a long time. I
decided to kill two birds with one stone and got his older brother (12
years old) and gave them my 14v cordless drill to drive the screws. I
figured the worst they could do was some minor finger pinching or
stabbing with the screwdriver bit - all educational type stuff - and
the 12yo is pretty good and keeping things under control.

An hour or so later they showed up and told me I had to come and see
their shelf, so I went with them to the garage (soon to be turned into
a shop) to see what they had done. The 9yo had selected from the scrap
pile two old bench supports from the deck we tore off last summer and
had screwed 2x6s on top between them. It was actually quite solid and
well aligned. Then it gets sticky. "I have to paint it now." He
announced. Well.... I decided it was time to do some serious teaching
stuff, so I had him sand it until it was reasonably smooth. Autism is
weird because physical stimulus can become a real problem. He wanted
to use the orbital sander, but a few minutes of that and the vibration
was just driving him nuts, so we spread the sanding out over a couple
of days. Then we had to get some paint.

Normally I would have plenty of paint floating around, but between not
having a shop yet and a lot of recently little projects, there was
nothing on hand, so we planned a trip to the Borg. Now this is a guy
who absolutely *loves* stores, and the Borg is one of his favorites. I
took him to the paint section and had him pick a color then we went
and got a quart of primer and went to the counter and I had him ask
the clerk to mix a quart of the color he had chosen. While that was
being done we went over and I bought him a paintbrush of his own (OK,
it was really just to keep him from using mine, but he was as thrilled
about having his own paintbrush as he was about anything else in the
project - kids love having real tools that are *theirs*). Back home
and straight away we went and put on a coat of primer. I carefully
explained to him about wiping off the loose sawdust and keeping things
as clean as we could. His concentration was excellent for about an
hour, although I had to finish up a bit of it. It was, however, his
project. The next day I helped him put the finish color on the legs
and underside of the shelf (it's actually more like a bench). He loves
purple, so it was painted a nice lilac that he chose.

I was pretty busy for a couple of days and didn't get back to the
project, so yesterday he went out on his own, opened up the paint can,
stirred it carefully and painted the top. He neatly re-sealed the can
and washed the brush out as well as I could have done. It really needs
another coat of paint to get a complete coverage, but his patience has
run out and he wanted to use it, *now*!

Upshot is that I now have a 4' long, purple shelf/bench in my dining
room with a Chuck-e-Cheese toy pizza oven on it. You know what? Right
now it's my favorite piece of furniture.

Tim Douglass

http://www.DouglassClan.com