Trebuchet Triumph

I learned something this week about my youngest son, Ben. And, I must say, it is a "game changer."


Background first. 


Thirty six hours after we met Josh (Sergey) and Ben (Oleg), they were our adopted sons and we were about to leave the orphanage in Magadan in far eastern Siberia. The orphanage director was giving us a brief, as in two sentence, summary of the character of these two little guys, who now shared our name but whom we didn't know at all. 

She explained how Joshua was like Cinderella, willing to work as hard as he could just so someone would love him.  Then she said Ben believed he was a prince and could get away with anything if he would just smile big enough.


YIKES!


When we got home, we learned just how astute her summary had been. 


Ben didn't want to do anything that he deemed "too hard." At first, that encompassed almost everything. 


I remember getting out the Duplo blocks (giant sized Legos) for the boys to play with because they would be easily understood without a language barrier. He was six years old, but he sat in the middle of the family room floor with a block in his hand, crying like a baby and sliding the block across the building base over and over and over again. It was too hard. He wanted someone to build it for him. Needless to say, he did not get what he wanted. Life, as he had known it, was over.


He wasn't planning to learn English, either. He was going to continue speaking Russian and have Joshua serve as his translator for the rest of his life. You think I'm joking? Nope. 


When we were able to begin their schooling, it was the same story. Everything was simply too hard. He didn't want to put forth any effort and he fought every step of progress we made. It has basically been the equivalent of dragging him along. For seven years. Granted, school is hard for him. And there are things he will probably never be good at--that's okay, as long as he does his best.


We required the kids to learn their math facts before they could start our math curriculum. Guess who learned them last? Yup! That's right. No matter what we tried, they just wouldn't stick. We tried flash cards, drills, worksheets, manipulatives, rewards. IT TOOK YEARS! And there was NO progress! I began to think that maybe he was just not able to learn them. Finally, I figured out that he was bluffing. 


We were planning one of our epic road trips and the cousins were coming along with us. The kids LOVE traveling with cousins. Everyone rides with everyone else and the miles just melt away. Knowing how much he was looking forward to that, I told Ben that if he did not learn his math facts by the time we left on our trip, he would be required to ride the entire 4600 miles in our vehicle working on his flash cards. And I was dead serious. A week later? He knew all his facts: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division! Now, without constant drill, they still aren't automatic. In fact, he has to stop and calculate almost everyone of them while working his problems. We may very well be dealing with some fetal alcohol syndrome, but he still has to learn to do his very best at every job he's given.


Fast forward to the past couple of weeks. 


Our little group of young people at church have been in a great study on Sunday nights. As part of the study, they completed a spiritual gift assessment. Of course, the accuracy of the results depends a great deal on understanding the questions and so we tried to explain any terms with which they were unfamiliar. 


Interestingly, the area Ben scored highest in was craftsmanship. Hmmm . . . Didn't really fit with what we had seen for the past 7 years, but we felt we needed to simply wait and see.


We didn't have long to wait.


As we prepare for the arrival of the cousins and the commencement of festivities in celebration of Thanksgiving, we thought having our own little "punkin chunkin" experiments would be great fun as a group activity. I ordered two trebuchet kits of very different design so the kids could learn about the physics involved in the different models. How difficult could it be to build them? They're only two or three feet tall, after all. We could add their construction to our already formidable list of preparations to be made. No problem.

When the box arrived, I wondered what on earth I had gotten myself into! These are the parts for just one of them!

This is the first one, completed.

And here is number two!


And guess who became completely and thoroughly engrossed?! Guess who took the very complicated instructions and read large parts of it himself and assembled complete sections without any help? The same young man who has absolute FITS with word problems in math! He was amazing! 


Not only did I see something completely new in him, so did he! It was so precious. He realized that he could do this. Even though it had many intricate steps and pieces, he understood what to do and how to do it! You should have seen his face! There was a new maturity and confidence in him that gives me such hope. 


He said, "Well you know, Mom, it is one of my Gifts." 


A switch flipped.


I think this will be one of those serendipity moments in his life that he will always be able to look back on and recognize that everything changed for him while building trebuchets.


Thank You, LORD!!