A garbage truck, but valuable time

Back a little while ago I had my nephew @mrbonkers down here for a time and we had a lot of fun doing so many things together; it was such a good time for both of us. I let him drive my truck (he's six and a half so it was time) and he shot one of my handguns (it was also time), we had water fights, cooked BBQ's together, went to the beach and all manner of other things...including building Lego.

I bought the set for him on the day after he arrived although he'd been encouraging me to do so from about the first minute he'd arrived. The pestering to build it also began immediately on getting the Lego but I didn't mind, I was looking forward to building with him. Here's the post I wrote about the process (mission) of buying the Lego.

I let my nephew build this himself with no physical assistance from me although I offered some suggestions from time to time if he started down the wrong path. I'd not tell him what to do, just make suggestions like, "maybe you should check if you've got those components in the right place." It was enough to make him stop, check his work against the plans and to rectify his errors.

He's really a very good builder, something I taught him the last time he was here, and a pretty clever little chap, analytical, attention to detail and all; he builds Lego at levels far above his age and that's going to work to his benefit down the track as he gets older, transferrable skills and all.

Something he also learned from me is that one cannot build Lego without also consuming snacks. I know, it seems odd that it would be so, but trust me, without snacks it's literally impossible to build Lego.

You can see the little tacker's last remaining cookie to the left of the image below and above are a few process shots and one of the rubbish truck emptying the bin into the storage section of the truck - the way Lego makes that work, the gears and lifting mechanisms and all, is really cool.

We built the truck over a couple days. He wanted to complete it all in one sitting but I made him slow down and take his time. All up it took him about five hours over the two days and he only needed correcting as above three of four times which I think is pretty good.

When we were selecting the set we had to consider that he'd need to get it back home on the plane so we couldn't get anything too big but I wanted to get something that challenged him and would also provide something for him to play with and that's exactly what this set provided. I enjoyed sitting with him building this garbage truck and look back on the time as well spent and valuable.