Summer vacation with an extremely smart and extremely devious six-year-old has been... interesting thus far. And by interesting I mean I am deeply regretting not sending her to summer camp. 

I've been attempting to redirect her obsession with Minecraft into an obsession with Legos, which has been largely successful. While looking up building instructions on the Lego website recently, we discovered that they're releasing a robotics kit next month. 

Needless to say, my tiny mad scientist wants it. And because am not made of money and also firmly believe in teaching kids the value of work, I said she could get it if she earns the money for it, and I handed her a box of beads and some wire and told her to get busy. 

I have to say, she did pretty darn well at it. I did the wire spirals and loops and put the earwires on, but she picked out the beads and arranged them herself, and then I gave her my phone and had her take photographs and crop the images, and she named each pair of earrings and helped me upload them to the website and will be packing up the orders when they sell. 

I've been putting her to work in the studio since she was old enough to stuff candy and business cards into orders or sort beads, and her Montessori preschool class raised a flock of chickens and sold the eggs, so she already has a rough idea of what's involved in running a business; it will be interesting to see what she learns from being involved in every aspect from design to production to order fulfillment. 

(We livestreamed the earring-making in the new WS Facebook group, if you'd like to get a look behind the scenes - I also highly recommend joining that group, if you haven't already, because it's a much more reliable way to get notifications of new shinies than the regular FB page. Plus, y'know, fun stuff like discussions and livestreams...)

So there you have it: feel free to support your friendly neighborhood junior mad scientist and her plans to build a robot army. This can't POSSIBLY go wrong...