A friend from work sent me some information on something called “Blockfest” at a children’s engineering fair at Boise State University this past weekend.  The intent of Blockfest is to teach kids about math and science through blocks.  The entry info said it was for kids aged six months to seven years.  I was skeptical that a nine month old could gleen anything from the experience so I emailed the organizer to see if she really thought Belén was old enough.  She assured me she was.

Both being engineers Andy and I thought it would be great to expose Belén to engineering as young as makes sense, so we signed her up and showed up at the BSU Kinesiology building ten minutes late because we got lost on our alma mater’s rival campus.  The first block-playing session was just concluding so we hustled in to join round two. 

Our first station was foam blocks…perfect for Belén, or so we thought.

It turns out that Belén must be teething again because her only interest in any of the blocks was in putting them in her mouth.  We gave her the book we had been given we arrived so as to avoid her saliva on the blocks other kids would be playing with.

Then we learned that there was a “drool box” for blocks that had been sucked on (to be rinsed with Clorox wipes) so we let her go to town and then collected all of her saliva-contaminated blocks together at the end of the session. 

After two sessions, we figured we had created enough blocks for the drool box so we decided to sneak out early.  I don’t know that I would call the event a success for our little one, although she did find a different way to explore the blocks than most of the other kids(orally).  We look forward to participating in the event next year when presumably, putting the blocks in her mouth won’t be of paramount interest.

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