I said the other day that adults live more boring lives than children because life does presents us fewer surprises. The other thing that sets children apart from us adults is that they don’t know their limitations, have unlimited ambition and are willing to cheerfully “try, try again” many, many times.

Case in point: building towers. When I build towers for Ingrid to knock down, they tend to be more or less straight, which lends them a certain stability but also predictability. When Ingrid builds a tower, she always stacks the blocks on their narrow ends and picks the tallest blocks, and she places the blocks whichever way they happen to land, which means it takes her about 10 tries to build something that’s more than 2 blocks high. (She also hasn’t understood yet that it is impossible to place another block on top of those narrow wedge-shaped ones.) While my towers don’t fall down when you breathe in their direction, Ingrid’s look more interesting.

Note: The second tower is a reconstruction; for some reason Ingrid tries to pick up her towers after she finishes building them, and they don’t generally survive that.