When I became a man, I put away childish things

A bit of a poignant milestone this weekend. We needed to make room in the basement for an electronic drum set, and this necessitates cleaning out the toy cupboards and saying farewell to some well-loved toys. Bionicles, in this case, but there are more. It's always hard to see these go.


Even the boy showed a moment of uncharacteristic sentiment.

But all to this end: This was driving us nuts, day after day.  The boy is actually a great drummer, but the sheer volume and duration (drumming is actually an endurance event! ask Neal Peart) was making us crazy and he was restricted to practicing when the rest of us were either out of the house or closeted upstairs with the dooor closed.
So the idea of an electronic drum set, which can be played with headphones so only the drummer can hear it at volume, sounded better and better all the time. But we needed to make room for it.

He can actually pull it out and have a bit more elbow room, but so far we all think it is pretty sweet. He can wake up at 3:45 in the morning and play it and the rest of us will be none the wiser. Happiness is restored.