Adrian gets restless. He likes to fiddle with things. Even when I’m reading to him at bedtime, he’s usually fiddling with something. It used to annoy me and I tried telling him to stop but I’ve learned to not do that.

He has a bunch of fidget toys that he alternates between. Or he just fiddles with some paperclip or chestnut or a lump of modelling clay.

Recently his favourite fiddle toy has been an old orange and white Rubik’s Snake. I had a snake like that when I was his age, and so did Eric. I’m not sure where this one came from but it could very well be my old snake. Or Eric’s.

The other day the plastic thread keeping the pieces together broke. According to Wikipedia the prisms are supposed to be connected with spring bolts but maybe that’s a newer construction. Or maybe this old snake was a cheap Chinese knock-off. In any case, it had a plastic thread instead of spring bolts, and when the thread broke, it all fell to pieces.

Apparently these are still a thing, and they still make them, and you can still buy them, which made Adrian very happy. He was even happier to find out that the snakes come in different sizes. So we now have a standard-sized 24-segment snake plus a double-sized one with 48. There are even snakes with 72 segments, but that seems like it might be unwieldy, so we didn’t go that far.