Paper Architect

When my relatives visited last month, the kids were doing arts and crafts one afternoon while the adults chatted. Little Man colored a picture of a spider, cut it out, and bent each segment of the spider's legs so it would stand up by itself.

"That's really neat," said my Auntie Arline. "Does he do things like that a lot?"

"He's never done that before," I said. It was pretty cool, but I didn't think much of it at the time.

But ever since then, he's been creating more and more elaborate things out of paper. And last week, he blew me away.

Here's what he drew:

"What's that?" I asked him.

"A pirate ship!" he said.

Huh. I shrugged. I could recognize the skulls and crossbones, and the ship's wheel, but other than that, I couldn't see how it was a pirate ship.

Then he cut it all out -- one single piece - and started folding it. Before I knew it, he had a perfect 3D paper pirate ship. I was floored. The ship's wheel is centered in the front. The front of the ship is angled forward, like a real ship. There's a bottom panel folded over to make the floor, with a perfect skull and crossbones centered and oriented forward. The two masts are the same size and angle, stay parallel, and meet perfectly at the top. All the angles match so the entire ship is plumb and stands up by itself.

I mean ... there's no way I could freehand something like that. I am just marveling at how he could so easily envision the angles, the folds, the three dimensions.