null Skip to main content
Robots and Valentines

Robots and Valentines

Feb 24th 2022

My son's robot. The play-doh on the chair are the heart and the brain. The legs are parts of my shop-vac. Duct tape joinery.

Every weekday I pick up my 2 kids (5 and 7 yrs. old) from school around 3pm. After we get home and have a snack I usually head back downstairs to my workshop to try and get some more work done before we eat dinner together. Usually the kids will play for a couple hours on their own until they are aloud to use their iPads before dinner. Occasionally they will make their way down to my workshop and start their own projects.

My son gets very focused on the activities he's in engaged in. His enthusiasm is usually driven by whatever movie, tv show, or book he is consuming at the moment. His Captain Underpants phase has been entertaining and resulted in him making a large number of hilarious, potty-humored, comic books. His most recent obsession, after watching the movie Big Hero 6, is to build a robot. Of course, there isn't any better place to do that than Dad's workshop.

After making his way down to the shop, he scavenged for materials and solved problem after problem to get the robot put together. Next came the difficult part, making the robot come alive. He tried and tested several different methods including putting metal in the robot's body, plugging an alarming number of power cords into the robot, putting microchips (memory cards) in the robot, and making a heart and brain out of play-doh.

My son working on his second robot. This one is a fighting robot. He is trying to figure out how to program it with the memory cards and keyboard.

In parallel with the robotics manufacturing, my daughter decided to make valentines for her mother using scrap wood,  cardboard, nails, glue, and paint. She also needed to solve several problems along the way to get her gifts to look just right. She needed to figure out how to hold two pieces of wood together while glue dried and how to hold a tiny nail while driving it into wood.

My daughter making valentines for her mom. This is where I take pictures of the tools you see on Bench & Chisel. I guess that work will have to wait until later :)

Truth be told, the above scenario is both a blessing and curse. It's a blessing because I get to spend real quality time with my kids and because I believe what they are doing is an extremely valuable type of learning they often don't get in school. It's a curse because I feel like every second counts as I try to create Bench & Chisel and a lot of these important seconds get shifted to the kids activities. However, I unequivocally believe that the benefits of these interruptions outweigh the costs.

The modern American work mentally is that work comes first at the sacrifice of self and family. One of the primary reasons I decided to quit my job last Summer and work on Bench & Chisel was because I couldn't pull away from this type of behavior. There was just too much pressure to give most of my time, energy, and thinking to that work, and in turn sacrificing my family's health and happiness, and my own.

At the end of the day, I would rather Bench & Chisel fail than become another all consuming pursuit to make money. I've learned many times over this isn't the path for me. More than anything, I want Bench & Chisel to integrate into my  life in a healthy way, supporting what is truly important to me - spending the time that I have in a way that feels right. In other words, I hope my kids interrupt me a lot more to help them with their projects in the workshop.

screen-shot-2021-08-10-at-3.54.45-pm.png